Date: 2003-07-15
From: Quarry Gap Shelters, Nr Fayetteville, Pa. 

To: James Fry Shelter
Miles today: 24.6

I woke yesterday to a massacre. Bodies were everywhere. After many of us had settled down for sleep, the "walk fast/ beer party" group had arrived late on, found the shelters full, and had bunked down on every area of the deck, including under and ON the picnic table. Fortunately it had been a dry night. As I was packing my gear and lifting my backpack down from its peg on the wall, a large occupant jumped out. On the arachnid scale of grossness, this fellow was definitely at the tarantula end of the spectrum. The good thing was that it got "Thistle" awake and out of her sleeping bag with little difficulty just for once. The day was cooler than of late, which gave me more energy and I made the pace for most of the day. "Two Speeds" was suffering from a stomach problem and took a number of stops. We finished the day at the Toms Run Shelters (two again) in the Michaux State Forest. Today is "Thistle's" birthday and she is 19. I gave her a tiny card made from a small square of cardboard cut from the cover of my journal. She seems to like it. Our destination this morning was the Pine Grove Furnace, only three miles away, where a hostel and store are located on the trail. This is very close to the AT half-way mark, and the store invites its customers to accept the "half-gallon challenge" - eat that quantity of Hershey's ice-cream at the current half-way mark on the AT. We would not do so, but the prospect of grilled food and an ice-cream to follow was still a great lure. Almost there, a familiar figure was waiting for us on the edge of the woods - "Chafe Master J". He had stayed at the hostel last night, had learned that we were just behind, and hung around this morning until we came through. It was great to see him at last, and we spent a couple of hours at the store eating and catching up. Several hikers - "Circus", "Buckie", and the girl group, "Pushing-up-Daisies", "Molasses", and "Flatlander" - arrived and all had a go at the ice-cream challenge. Watching them toiling over the second two pints, I wouldn't want to go hiking after that!  When we had walked into Pine Grove, the hostel was up to our left hand side, a sharply sloping but beautifully landscaped garden between it and the road. It was being tended by an elderly lady in comfortable loose-fitting gardening clothes and a wide-brimmed hat. She waved to us, but otherwise carried herself in a languid, relaxed way that suggested she would shortly go in to take afternoon tea or sit with a mint julep on the porch. The hostel is in fact the original Ironmaster's Mansion, built in 1827 and a part of the iron making operation that existed here until the end of the 19th century. The stone furnace, which used charcoal for fuel, still stands. The Ironmaster's Mansion was also a stop on the Underground Railroad, the network of locations and people that enabled runaway slaves to escape to the north before the Civil War. Its secret room can still be seen in the hostel today. As I walked round the area admiring a good many of the shrubs and trees planted there (and frustratingly unable to identify them), the lady from the hostel had come down to the store, and I went over to speak to her. I quickly realised my earlier mistake, for she was a young woman , in fact a southbounding hiker called "Hmmm", a botany graduate from Boston. She did the first part of the trail last year, at least down to New York, and hopes to complete her southbound journey this year. She is doing the garden at the hostel in lieu of payment. I loved our conversation, for its form as well as its content. "Hmmm" seems to let the world, her surroundings, this AT experience, wash over her, as if to absorb it slowly so she can study it and understand it better. Hence her name possibly, but it was so refreshingly different from the majority of hikers who rush constantly from one task to the next, or one blaze to the next, to meet their daily schedules. That's the way of the "real world", the one everyone says they came out here to escape. Maybe we aren't escaping at all. Hmmm.  Around mid-afternoon, the four of us got on our way, and are spending the night at the James Fry Shelter. After supper, I made a birthday cake for "Thistle", composed of two large chocolate chip cookies for a base, two fig bars on top of them, and a single candle pressed into the fig bars. As we sang "Happy Birthday", "Thistle" seemed touchingly pleased with her "cake", which I suppose proves that it's the thought that counts. P.S. We passed through a personal milestone today. We have done 1,000 miles! A few more to go.