Date: 2005-04-21
From: Low Gap campsites, (NC/TN?)

To: Trail jct. past No Business Knob Shelter, (NC/TN?)
Miles today: 14.6
Weather: scattered clouds

I woke up this morning to find a big glass perfume bottle of Ralph Lauren ¢Beautiful¢ leaning against my knee braces, along with a note reading Tag, you¢re it! Slip this into someone else¢s pack. ¢The GoLight GoEasiers.You¢re kidding me, I thought. I looked around for a culprit. Pacman was sitting nearby and I thought he looked suspicious. ¢Pacman,¢ I said. ¢Party foul.¢ ¢Huh?¢ he said. ¢Not cool,¢ I said. ¢What are you talking about?¢ he said. ¢I think you know,¢ I said. ¢What the hell are you talking about?¢ he said. ¢What do you think I did!?¢ Hmm, I thought. The boy has the air of genuine innocence. Maybe I will slip him the perfume during a lunch break. ¢Nothing,¢ I said. ¢Never mind.¢So I let slip the affair of the perfume from my mind for a little while, and headed out. The morning was hazy but dry, though we¢d heard a rumor that our string of beautiful weather days might be ending later that afternoon. Up on Big Bald, Pacman and I found Linux, the Gypsy Sisters and Ranger up there taking a break. It was windy, and Linux had his foam sleeping pad wrapped around him like a blanket; the Gypsy sisters were leaning against each other for warmth. Ranger, who had found a pair of ridiculous skintight neoprene shorts in a hiker box back in Hot Springs, handed the shorts to Pacman, who promptly put them on and was cavorting around in them when Nick and Dave arrived.A mile later, we stopped at Bald Mountain Shelter for a privy visit and a late-midmorning snack break. Nick and Dave had gone ahead, but the other six of us were there and I was idly flipping through the register when handwriting that looked suspiciously like Scholar¢s caught my eye. But surely that couldn¢t be ¢ she was behind, along with CJ and Feelin Free (or Good Times, as we¢d begun referring to her) and Andy. Wasn¢t she? I stared at the page for a minute. Never claimed to be the sharpest crayon in the box, and it¢s possible it took me a bit longer than it rightly should have to figure out what had happened, but there they were, messages from all four of them, to the effect that they¢d night-hiked last night, sneaked past us, reached the bald we¢d just come down in time for sunrise, and were now ahead of us. And, as I knew now, they were the guilty party responsible for the perfume debacle. Free¢s register inquiry as to whether we smelled nice and Andy¢s line drawing of someone blowing a raspberry added insult to injury.¢Those bastards!¢ I yelled. ¢They passed us last night! They¢ve been here already! They stealthed it on us and they¢re ahead and smug right this second! They were on the bald for sunrise!¢ General uproar ensued ¢ lots of ¢What!?¢ and ¢How?¢ and ¢Unacceptable!¢ ¢ and then the following roughly reconstructed conversation: (Among general uproar) Me, chucking the perfume bottle on the table: And I¢ll tell you what¢s wrong! What¢s wrong is they sneaked by last night and left THIS everloving piece of crap leaned up against my bionic knees! Ralph Lauren ¢Beautiful,¢ eight ounces, my ass!Pacman: That¢s what you were talking about this morning!Me: Yeah.Pacman: That¢s what you thought I did!Me: Well, yeah. Pacman: I can¢t believe you thought I did it! The note is clearly not from one of us! And we could have figured out this- this disaster ¢ miles back!Me: I should have known better.Pacman: You should have.Me: I should have.Pacman, pacing, register in hand: I am seething! I am too angry to sit down and write! Oh, it is on. The game is ON. Like Donkey Kong. I won¢t take this from the GLGE Senior Citizen contingent!Me: Oh, hell hath no fury.Touk: For real.Me: This is a GLGE travesty, is what this is. I AM GLGE. It started with these feet. They can¢t DO this. A travesty, I tell you.Touk: Where¢s Gypsy?Linux: In the privy.Touk: What do we do?Me: Well, she¢ll be back in a minute.Touk: No! About them!Linux: Let¢s think about this. Let¢s think about their plans. Either they¢re going to No Business Knob Shelter or they¢ll push on into Erwin tonight.Me: They started five miles back from where we did, remember. If they go into Erwin tonight that¢ll have been a 26 mile day for them. That¢s a long day. And I don¢t think they¢d want to waste a night in town and spend money when they¢d be getting in too late to rest much. Linux: Unless they want to push into town so we can¢t stealth past them tonight.Pacman: No. They want to watch us. They want to watch us come in and they want us to come in defeated and they want to laugh. They will not go into town tonight.Touk: I think he¢s right. I think they¢ll be at No Business Knob tonight.Me: They¢ve got No Business being such Knobs, if you know what I¢m saying.Touk: Enh. But what do we do?Linux, after conferring with Pacman: We¢re developing a plan. We¢ve decided a knife should be involved. We¢ll leave a note. But we¢ll stab it into the picnic table.Me: Wait, wait. The neoprene shorts. Here¢s what we do. Oh, please. We soak the shorts in the perfume and then stab the whole mess into a picnic table with a note saying Eat my shorts, packsniffers. Sniff THIS. Oh, PLEASE.Pacman: I want to keep those shorts.Me: Are you for real?Pacman: Hell yeah! We can¢t stab the shorts! Too destructive! I¢m keeping them!Me: Aw, man.Touk: But what do we do?Ranger: I¢m Switzerland, guys. I¢m everyone¢s friend. I¢m uninvolved.Me: You can¢t be Switzerland. You¢re in too deep.Ranger: I can be Switzerland if I want to be Switzerland.Me: What, are you going to bust out with a bunch of banks next? Are you investing in neoprene shorts? Do you have inside information?Linux: Enough. Here¢s what we do. They¢re going to be tired. They¢re going to stop and take a long lunch break before the shelter. They¢re going to hope we¢ll walk up on them. So we go slow, and take a long break ourselves, so they stay ahead. And then we go till we get just before No Business, and we lay up till dark, and then we can stealth past. And by that time we¢ll have figured out what to do, anyway.Pacman: Here¢s what I¢m thinking. We don¢t even involve the perfume. We take the perfume out of the equation. Cause if we give it back, they¢ll just return it anyway. But we leave them a note that makes them think they have it. And then they¢ll tear their packs apart looking for it.Me: Serve them right.It was about this time that Tiny Dancer and Hooky walked in. They¢d just come from Sam¢s Gap, where they¢d eaten at a diner down the road. Tiny Dancer, feeling generous, busted out a pack of cookies and some cold pizza, and we fell on it like wolves. They asked what the uproar was they¢d walked in on. ¢Let¢s just say,¢ I said, ¢that some vigilante justice is about to be enacted. We¢re on a mission.¢ ¢Uh-huh,¢ said Hooky. ¢It¢s all in the register,¢ said Touk. ¢Okay,¢ said TD. ¢You did not see us,¢ said Pacman. ¢When you go on. Okay? You came back from town and you did not see us. All day.¢ ¢We did not see you,¢ they repeated.We pressed on ¢ the vigilante justice mission nearly thwarted when we came very, very close to accidentally walking south out of the shelter ¢ and stopped for a while at Whistling Gap. It started raining, softly. I crossed my fingers and hoped it¢d blow over. It did. Ranger left soon, saying she wanted to go to No Business Knob for the night, but not to worry, she wouldn¢t say anything to the others about our plans. ¢Switzerland,¢ I said. ¢Switzerland, yet.¢ The other five of us packed up a bit later. Pacman and Linux, with impatient expressions and long legs, proposed that the two of them ¢ who could walk much faster than either the Gypsy sisters or I ¢ bust ahead and, in their words, ¢do recon.¢ They¢d wait up for us at the stream before the shelter. Good enough, so they took off, and Gypsy and Touk and I meandered the seven miles to the stream in question without incident (though I did nearly fall into a creek trying to rinse my face off). The sisters sang sea chanteys and I listened, and we found the boys at the stream as promised, a little while before dark.We sat in the middle of the trail and cooked dinner, waiting for it to get dark enough to stealth by. Alas, just as I¢d finished dinner number one, and was contemplating cooking second dinner when a roll of thunder sounded and rain began sheeting down. Rapidly repacking, we suddenly saw headlamps coming our way from the south. Pacman jumped up to intercept them ¢ our entire scheme might be thwarted if these erstwhile late-evening hikers told everyone at the shelter they¢d seen us ¢ and he nearly scared Serenity out of her wits by popping up in front of her face without warning, saying, ¢Don¢t worry, it¢s me.¢ We swore Serenity, Freedom, and Thatch to secrecy ¢ and quickly, since the rain was moderately torrential by this point, and they weren¢t all that jazzed about standing around in a downpour chewing the fat with a bunch of vigilante-justice-crazed tools. The one advantage to the thunderstorm was that it provided excellent cover for a stealth mission. We let Serenity and Freedom and Thatch go by, waited a few minutes, turned off our headlamps, put away our hiking poles, and crept past the shelter. We were halfway past ¢ in other words, right smack in front of the thing ¢ when a flashlight emerged from the darkness, sweeping over the trail. We dropped to our knees in the mud and rain, trying to breathe quietly, trying to maintain balance. I¢ve rarely had a harder time holding in a belly laugh. I was dying. Finally the light receded and we crept the rest of way past. Not a tenth of a mile north of the shelter was an unmarked trail crossing; we turned up it just far enough to get out of sight, and hurriedly pitched our tents in a clearing. The five of us convened in the Gypsy Sisters¢ tent, out of the rain, and collectively composed the following manifesto on a sheet of the legal paper Curtis gave me, of which Sara is so fond:*** When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one hiking cadre to dissolve the epistemological bands which connect it to another and thereby to prove once and for all which cadre can, in fact, go lighter and easier, the following central philosophical questions are indubitably raised:1) How do you like THIS smell, PACKSNIFFERS?2) Little Orphan Andy - who left you on our doorstep? Wingfoot?3) Cuppa -paybacks-a-bitch-isn't-it?- Joe4) Scholar - did you read the book where you saw THIS one coming?5) Good Times - not as much fun as the time we spent WATCHING you SLEEP, was it?6) BOTTLE ,BOTTLE, who's got the bottle? It could be anywhere - your sleeping bag - your food bag - your pack - or possibly your boots. Breathe deep, PACKSNIFFERS, and start looking.The wages of sin are death. The Few, the Proud, and the Easy.Break a Leg and Swallow your PrideTouk-me-for-grantedLinux, the Unstable VersionGypsy Too-much-for-you-luKeep An Eye On Your Pacman***Linux and Pacman, burning with the fires of justice, put the manifesto into a gallon-sized Ziploc, pocketed a knife, and slipped silently back up the trail towards the shelter. They returned half an hour later, sans manifesto and knife, with nonchalant expressions. ¢Well?¢ we demanded. ¢How did it go? Where did you put it?¢ ¢Oh, well, we sneaked around a while,¢ said Pacman. ¢Wanted to make sure we had the right tent. I must have spent ten minutes listening to Cuppa Joe breathe. But it was him. And we found a log, and we stabbed the manifesto into it. Don¢t worry, it¢s not dangerous. The log¢s kind of rotten, and the knife is buried to the hilt. And then we put the log in the vestibule of his tent. It¢ll be the first thing he sees in the morning.¢ The knife,¢ added Linux, ¢is stabbed into the paper right next to the words, ¢The wages of sin are death.¢¢ ¢Perfect,¢ I said. ¢You know what he¢s gonna say when he finds it, right?¢ said Pacman. ¢What?¢ I asked. He cleared his throat. ¢Holy shit,¢ he said. ¢Ho-ly shit.¢Pacman¢s imitation of a perturbed CJ was pitch-perfect. I nearly fell over.