Date: 2004-04-07
From: Georgia

To: Maine
Miles today: 183.0
Weather: overcast clouds

Mile 183April 7, wednesdayHaving a hard time keeping my spirits up. Two guys from Gatlinburg,long like cigarettes and silent, sit chain smoking by the fire. They're cooking steak they hauled up from town. I'm eating granola. Ashort distance from the stone dungeon-like shelter Circuit Rider readsaloud from the Bible to the boys of the so-called Fab Five. They needall the prayer they can get, I figure, staring down at a 25-mile daytomorrow. Already the flies harrass me. I can see insects bringingdown my house of cards "big hike conviction" real easy some day moretired and pained and feeling less purpose than today. Some day soon,perhaps. I sleep fitfully. In the night, one or both of theGatlinburg boys is up for a smoke. I can smell it mingled with thestench of woodfire smoke. I rise to pee once in the night, go outthrough the chainlink fence gate into the bear-infested night. Themoon is near full. There are no bears. I begin to think the wholebear thing is a myth. In the morning a doe trots into camp to sayhello. "Bambi" I say to her just a few feet away, and in an instantshe bounds into the air, pirouttes, comes down and does the wildestjig. All of us are stunned. A small group of other locals, probablytwo fathers and their boys, have been chuckling at my impressions ofGollum and Schmeogal and Bill Murray from Caddyshack. For a while overbreakfast, I think I've lost my signature hat. Sewed myself andresembling that of a jester, it has earned me the trail name Jester. Suddenly I remember that i'd left it in the pocket of my rain jacket. I excitedly yank it out, place it on my head and screach with Schmeogaljoy. After the Bambi incident they look at me strangely, as though Ireally am crazy and have somehow spoken to this animal directly. It isthe sort of moment I enjoy. On the trail again this morning I am asloth. I simply cannot muster yesterday's power or enthusiasm. Mainsail and Mockingbird stay with me, sortof, but are always just outof audio range such that all I hear of their bubbling laugh-filleddialogue is unintelligable sounds. Their "sailing" pace "mocks" me. Our one fine moment comes atop Rocky Top Mountain in Tennessee asMainsail sings an Appalachian song and I laugh and try in vain toremember the verse. This much I get:Corn don't qrow at all on Rocky TopDirts too rocky by farThats why all folks out on Rocky TopGet their corn from a jarIt goes on about moonshine makin' and sweet Appalachian girls and such.It makes the pain in my knees a little more bearable. But now I'velost them, too far ahead in this Hobbit-like ridgeline forest ofstrange grass hummocks and gnarled little trees like fruit trees barein winter. The fields of blonde grass long and lopped over like 70shaircuts are not smooth but consistently bumpy, like a convention of10,000 hedgehogs elbow to elbow basking in the mountaintop sun. Thereare patches of snow everywhere and I eat from them and when it's hot,fill my hat with it and let the icy coolness dribble down my neck. Imust retain my sense of purpose out here, or I am done for. It ishard, hard work and endless, and the candidates for Katahdin aredropping like flies. Yet just what is my purpose for doing this madthing? Already I have forgotten. I have learned that Gatlinburg isnot far off the trail and makes for a nice break in the Smokys with itsVegas-like atmosphere and Dollywood, the interactive homage to DollyParton. I will stop there then and rest and eat a hamburger, drink abeer. Walking without a penny in one's pocket, even here in the freeforest, is difficult. My experience of being denied a motel room inFontana was degrading, however well I paved over the sting with words. To Gatlinburg then, to spend some money on myself and give this achingbody a moment's rest. Then it will be back into the Smokys for onemore night straddling two 15-mile days. Just eight more miles todayand ten tomorrow, then I can rest my lonesome heart and dizzy head inDolly Parton's ample.. bed? Breasts? Whatever. -RSM "Jester" of AT2004Mile 193Double Spring Shelter(same day)While sitting trailside writing earlier, a guy and girl with matchingorange hats went zooming by me like they were just out for the weekendpulling a thiry mile day or so. I didn't think much of it. Then I metthem both at the next shelter. We got chatting and I learned that Iwas talking to Silver Girl and none other than Flyin Brian, thelegendary hiker who in one ten month stretch hiked the Triple Crown:the AT, the PCT and the Continental Divide.   He is the only man tohave ever done them all in one year, and with two months to spare atthat! Needless to say my morning musings of pain and sloath just wentright out the window. Only recently introduced to this whole world ofheavy-duty hiking, I admit I didn't know who Flyin Brian was two monthsago. Bruce at Nomad Adventures in Idyllwild was the first to tell meabout Brian's feat. Bruce knows a lot about his business and helped mea lot getting the right gear together. I think he would have liked tohave been a fly on my hat when Flyin Brian blew by me and I didn't evenknow it. I won't soon forget Brian's look of consternation as heregarded the substance of my light lunch, carrots, carob clusters,dates, stilton cheese and water crackers. The Triple Crown championwas impressed, stuck as he was with the Kraft cheese andchocolate-covered peanuts he'd acquired locally. Funny day. And of course another super-painful day. For some reason, the mileswent by a lot slower today and time went faster. I was humping it fromeight in the morning until six at night, almost non-stop. I decidedthe word for the day was stamina, which fits into the sentence "I haveno stamina." If I do succeed in hiking this whole trail, I gotta dosomething fat to follow such an act, so to speak.   Speaking more toBrian's achievement than talking about myself, I said to him, "Yeah, Iwas thinking if I finished the AT I'd go run with the bulls inPamplona." The idea being what do you do to top an act like his? Brian didn't bite. He just said I should go on and hike the PCT. Later when Mainsail asked him what he did with those two remainingmonths of the year he did the Triple Crown, he replied that he went toAcadia National Park in Maine and did a buncha small day hikes whilereacclimating to society. My uncle David drowned and was never foundoff the coast of Acadia in the late Sixties. Small world. I bet Brianhas seen the plaque made for David and situated on a cliff above wherehe drowned. It's like the only unnatural thing in the park. The views here in the Smokys are incredible, just mountain aftermountain after mountain. So of course my camera batttery died. All iwill have to remember the park by is some very, very sore feet. Andmaybe a postcard from Dollywood. Bunked up in another ancient stoneshelter tonight, this one not so uglified by chain link fences. Theprivy, or shitter, is of the composting type, and sits up in the air. It's like an outhouse in a treehouse. Which sure beats what I saw afew shelters back: a privy area minus the privy. The effect was a minefield of dangerous deposits only occasionally announced by tufts ofwhite tp. Very strange. If there's no privy, why bother making anarea? Why not just post a sign that says "Please go shit far away fromthe shelter. Thank you." Whatever. The boys are amazed at my myfully reclined typing trick. It is pretty cool. But really it is theonly way I can write . In as much pain as I am in, sitting up in bedis out of the question. And when I am not lying down, I'm hiking. That's pretty much it.   Huffing and puffing up hill after hill, orfalling down to cook some gruel, brush my teeth, and collect water fromthe springs. That's all I do. That's all I can do after hiking allday. I guess Ray Jardine was right in his book ... Hitting the traillike I did without any prior training makes for a hike that is nothingbut survival. And so I survive. But hey, I'm telling a story, too. So I guess I've got him beat on that. -RSM "Jester"