Date: 2004-10-03
To: Katahdin
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: clear sky

October 3, 2004Someplace in the woods of MaineAll I can tell you for sure without dragging out the topo maps and mileagereference guide (and in so doing disturb my sleeping Yazzy) is that I resttonight at the far northern foot of the last real mountain (of literallyhundreds crossed, crested or circumnavigated) between me and Mount Katahdin, or Kaatdn as Thoreau spelled it.I rest, and yet I never rest well. So at two o¢clock this morning, just anhour ago, I wearily rose, dressed and stumbled out of tent (crawled is in factthe best verb befitting the action of entering or exiting these expeditiontents) and with aid of dim headlamp only, made my way to the only outhouseextant for tent miles North or South, a human-sized box on stilts. My businessfinished, I set out on my return trip to our tent some fifty paces away. Somewhere. Yes somewhere in the woods not more than.. okay maybe 100 pacesdistant, sat our tent. Somewhere.But suddenly with headlamp dim from fast-fading batteries and without myprescription glasses, I looked at the outhouse and I had a doubt. I hadapproached it from the rear, right? Or had it been the left? Oh shit. Suddenly in that miscalculation alone, I had opened up about ninety degrees ofdense wilderness in which to spread out my search team, me my self and I,and hunt down our tent. Mother of God, lost again!Mind you, dear reader, that forest trails are not like the nicely-gradedwalkways of parks, even BIG parks like Yosemite. The AT is itself almostcompletely indiscernible from the surrounding landscape, this in BROADDAYLIGHT! Add to this the very name given this bowsprit NeverNeverland ofnorthern Maine jutting as it does deep into Canada, ¢The 100-Mile Wilderness¢and you¢re starting to get the picture.Setting out with the privy at my back, I walked therefore a ¢path¢ which boreno resemblance to any path known to modern man. I was walking on memory,and I was thus, within a minute¢s time, completely lost.How had I found the privy in the first place, you ask. Same way. Memory. Ihad a vague recollection of seeing the outhouse on my way into the shelter areaand so knew it to be somewhere vaguely ¢over there.¢Obviously I found my way back eventually, or you¢d be reading this in a patternof sticks and stones laid out on some lakeshore or bald mountain top, my finalwords before disappearing forever into the wilds of Canada or wherever. ¢Hisfinal words.. a story about a privy.. rather banal, strange, but it¢s allwe¢ve got to go on. No S.O.S., just some silly thesis on comparative forestenvironments, or some such thing.¢I¢d likely be off in the trees somewhere standing nose-to-snout with the pissedoff bull moose whose moose coitus I interrupted this afternoon when the wildhowling calls of bull and cow drove Yazzy and me off-trail to investigate. Atany rate, I found my way back to our tent tonight by first locating a whiteblaze, which I followed in the wrong direction for awhile, then a blue blazewhich I followed right to our tent. Go figure.8:27 a.m.I write funny because of these fingerless gloves I¢m wearing. It¢s the third ofOctober and I may as well be in Alaska for what a clear post-night¢s rain ofmorning sky brings. Thirty-eight degrees. Yee-hah! It¢s March in Georgia allover again. But with a difference: I can see Katahdin!! I have him in mysights! I have won the hunter¢s lottery for the right to kill this year. Andany day now, I¢m gonna raise my weapon, aim, and I¢m gonna take themotherfucker down. Mount Katahdin: DOA. Mount it on my wall. And NO! I¢m not gonna do it out of mercy or some ecological ¢culling of theherd¢ or even because I¢m starved and I need the meat. No I¢m gonna do it forvengeance. Oh, and for the trophy to hang on my wall. I¢m gonna shoot the oldgrandfather out of pure sardonic gratitude. Thanks for the blisters!Thanks for the shredded knee ligaments and the 147 twisted ankles! Thanks forthe pain so bad in the balls of my fee that I pissed myself in Jersey. Thanksfor the trip half way `round the sun that made me miss Burning Man, Houston¢sArt Car Parade, San Francisco¢s Art Car Fest, and my 20-Year Torrey Pines HighSchool Reunion. Thanks for the chiggers, the rattlers, the ticks and the mice. And thanks for nothin¢ for denying me even ONE bear sighting in two thousandmiles.Yazzy eats her oatmeal out of the packet. Worse, she most often eats it COLD! Just add cold water, eat. Primitive hussy. I have brought warm water into herlife. I am a missionary of sorts, bringing God to a savage world.Today we have to ford another river. This will make three. Two thoughts: one,the logging companies that own all this land don¢t need the islands. Two,they should build us bridges!10:36The Ford was not a Ford but a Chevy. Easy. Rock hopper. Yazzy tells about ahospital visit, a severe sinus infection early in her thruhike and of herinsurance company¢s refusal to pay for her ER visit. Cost to her: $600.I stop her short of more details. ¢Please, don¢t go on. That shit makes me goFight Club. I just wanna go postal.¢ I think of several good lines fromChuck¢s twisted book/film about wanting burn it all down, blow it up, ¢..put abullet in the head of every endangered panda that won¢t screw to save itsspecies.¢It¢s time to walk now, another sixteen today, a cake walk into Antler¢sCampsite, purportedly the most beautiful site on the trail. The rain was kindenough to do its thing last night whilst we slept. Today is all sunshine, bluesky and the sepia-washed rainbow of spring and summer¢s death which is autumn,which is right and natural, brutal, unforgiving yet natural, comprehensibleunlike anything ever conceived of by Man.12:40 p.m.Little Boardman Peak takes me by surprise, another goddamn hump up some uselesspile of rocks. And me with ancient back injury not felt since throwing mybuddy Frank¢s kids in the pool a summer ago now flared up, my whole lower backat tight and angry fist of sporadic breath-taking pain. I curse at themountain, small as it is, saying ¢Fuck you, peak! Fuck you! I stomp on you,fucking peak!¢ and so on to the not-so-distant top (only 500 feet straight up). Yazzy is fortunately a way¢s back, having stopped to pee, and thus misses mytirade, a potentially frightening litany of fucks. I think back to that day in the Doyle Hotel with Yippee and Jabberwock, theformer fixing me with that intense stare of hers and asking (in the way onetells more than asks) ¢Well, are you STILL a thruhiker?¢ The question aroseover my recent ¢departure¢ from the trail, my ¢aqua-blaze¢ as it were in whichI substituted 100 miles of the AT to parallel the Shenandoah Mountains in acanoe, paddling 100 miles of the Shenandoah River. ¢Well, ARE YOU, JESTER? SAY IT!¢I did. Yes I did. And yes I am. Over 2000 miles on foot. 7:45 pm Cooper Brook Lean-ToEverything on the AT north of some geographical line I never noticed is alean-to. In the South, they are shelters. In the New England, they arelean-to¢s. Likewise, shitters in the South are privies, whereas here in theNorth they are outhouses. Sometimes the carved and painted wooden signs boltedto tree even announce the presence of a ¢toilet.¢ Make no mistake, however, the upright, spider-infested coffin-on-stilts with ahole in it ISN¢T a toilet, no matter what the $10 Home Depot butt ring and lidset might seem to imply.Today in the mid-afternoon of my lower back spasm hobble toward Katahdin, Naturecalled when there was no toilet, no privy, no outhouse. And so I did my best toimprovise and utilized, as I so often do, a downed tree sitting roughlytoilet-height from the ground. Crude as this may sound to those of you readingfrom the snug comfort of your suburban ¢reading room,¢ said practice is quiteacceptable and about as good as it et for the long-distance hiker adrift in atoilet-less world for six month at a stretch.Unfortunately, due to my strained lower back, I had to concede to a slightlyless-acceptable distance from the trail in taking, as it were, Nature¢s Call. In layman¢s terms, I had to shit just spitting distance from the Great Rock &Root Highway, the wilderness sidewalk called the AT.Six months ago when this journey was young, I met a man from Peabody, Mass namedRael. I didn¢t care much for the man at first, but very soon changed my mindabout him, taking great pleasure in finding that my first impression had beenthoroughly wrong. And it got better. I soon found in the 49-year old Rael akindred spirit of the Monty Python Kind. Rael, it turned out, had the sameverbatim memory and perfectly accented recitation of line after line, sketchupon sketch of Python material, as myself. We were a perfect match for hikingpartners. But it was never to be. Rael got ahead of me and I just never caught up. I hadeven dreamed up and begun practicing the lines of a ¢Holy Grail¢ mock sketch toperform with him at Trail Daze in Damascus. But that, too, never came to pass. And that was the last time I saw Rael.Until today.Until smack dab in the absolutely remotest region of the AT at the leastopportune time, I looked up from my too-close-to-the-trail toilet activities,and who should appear from the north (the one direction I wasn¢t looking,because in October the thruhike game is largely over and who the hell would bewalking AWAY from Katahdin?) but Rael. Holy shit. The Python¢s couldn¢t havewritten a more down-to-Earth, laugh at the naked truth, ¢you¢re human and youbetter get used to the idea¢ kind of Meaning of Life reunion. Here¢s to youRael. Congratulations on your summit of Katahdin and Happy 50th Birthday, youbare-chested South Boston Napoleon with the touch facade and the Pythonfalsetto heart. God Bless you in this time of post-AT depression and may youhave your Pegasus and eat it, too. Via con Dios, Rael.9:04 pmI lay atop Yazzy to quell her shivering. This is the same technique employed toraise the body temperature of a hypothermia victim, but Yazzy is hardlyhypothermic. She has braved the roaring creek not two car-lengths from thelean-to, though why I use the phrase ¢car length¢ I haven¢t a clue. There areno cars out here. The only way in or out of here is fifty miles on foot. If you¢re severely injured or just plain rich, they¢ll take you out on a seaplane.Rael spoke sorrowfully of three dead moose he¢d just seen at the game warden¢soffice outside Baxter State Park. Hunting season. The moose lottery. They¢llsell you a t-shirt, a box of chocolate moose turds, postcards of moose grazingin the golden fields, then turn tail and sell lottery tickets. Win thelottery, bag a moose. ¢How hard is it to shoot a moose?¢ Rael asks. ¢They use the excuse of too manyaccidents with cars. Let¢s shoot cars instead!¢Edward Abbey woulda liked that, woulda been first out there with a shotgun. Andthen Rael. And then me, what the hell. Polite, of course. Fake road blocks. Cars stopped, ¢Excuse me folks, would you kindly step out of the vehicle. We¢re engaged in a top-secret moose protection plan up here in the 100-MileWilderness, just need a moment to give your vehicle the once over.¢Have a heated trailer nearby. Nintendo for the kids. Coffee and donuts for thedads, maybe Oprah reruns on the TV for the wives, the volume cranked up ofcourse. Way loud. Loud enough to cover shotgun fire as Ed & Rael & I turn thefamily minivan into Swiss cheese. Have a shuttle bus ready to take the familymoose-watching at the nearby favorite buck moose rutting grounds, maybe evenslip in a little monster-sized moose sex ed for the kids, Nature Channel style,then back to their hotel where dad, now talked into the whole mad gonzoeco-logic of the thing, would with confidence ring up his insurance company andexplain the whole thing as a moose collision, total coverage. When the going gets weird, the weird take to the woods. And failinginsurrection on even the smallest moose-lottery abolishment level, there¢salways Mazatlan and Mama Margarita out there on Isla de Piedras, two homecooked meals a day and a palapa palm frond hut all my my own for $5/day plusanother $5 or so for half a dozen liter bottle of the freshest Pacifico you candrink, right from the brewery in town. And failing that there¢s the next IceAge. I figure, either way we can¢t lose.9:34 pmEveryone is asleep. Spin Cycle, Impulse, Tarzan and Yazzy. I¢m the solesurvivor! In the cave black darkness before me, headlamp off, one nickel-sizedorange ember holds out from a campfire begun and soon neglected hours ago. Iwas powerless to help it. I promised Yazzy that if she cooked dinner andboiled water for my goodnight whiskey/cocoa concoction, that I would lay flatout and rest my back (did I mention I threw my back out?) in preparation for tomorrow¢s push to Antler¢s campsite. From there we will be just forty miles from Baxter¢s front gate, then one day¢swalk to Kaatdn¢s tippy toes, sleep, rise with the sun and summit. Finito. Done. Ende das Endung. Fertig. Fin.I look again and the ember has gone black. Time for me to do the same. -RSM