Date: 2004-07-24
From: Rausch Gap Shelter

To: What's Up With That?
Miles today: 17.4

I woke up to a cool and dry morning. A breeze dried the wetness from the tarp which shields my hammock from the rain.The first miles of the trail led me through a beautiful stretch of forest. Much of the terrain was level, enabling me to walk at a comfortable and steady pace.For the first time on this journey, I forded a stream. The water was not deep but the current was strong. Rocks lay beneath the surface. I wore my sandals during the crossing and utilized a large stick for leverage. The steam was crossed safely.Here is another first on this journey: The color of the sky was a deep, azure blue. While hiking in the southern states, the blue sky on clear days contained a milky whiteness, possibly from moisture in the air; I nick named it a "skim milk sky." Today, the whiteness was gone.The dry air improved the scenery at viewpoints.Near the end of our hike for the day, Gather, Wipe Out, and I attempted to hitch rides on Route 501 to Pine Grove, PA, where a food market was located. At first we hitched together, but nobody pulled over. I suggested that it would be hard for the three of us to obtain a ride together. To improve our chances, I suggested that Wipeout and Gather hitch together and I walk down the road and thumb a ride by myself. If they got a ride first, they could ask the driver to pull over and pick me up.That scenario is what happened. I had walked half a mile when a sport utility vehicle pulled over. The driver was a young man with two male friends of similar age. The vehicle became crammed with six people and three backpacks. I sat in the middle of the seat behind the driver.In the front seat beside the driver was a young man whose face was disfigured. There was no nose or even a nasal canal in the center of his face. His eyes had no lashes. His mouth was a small circular hole without lips.The driver offered to take us to the food market. As we headed there, I apologized to the young men for our smelly bodies. The man with the disfigured face without a nose turned around and joked that our odor was not a problem because he could not smell anything whatsoever. We all broke out in laughter at his remark. Since he had broached the subject of his face, I asked him about the source of his injury. He said that a gunshot had been the cause. He did not mention any details about what had happened. I respected this person for the spirit of his personality in spite of his severe and obvious injury.The young men drove us to a food market, waited in the parking lot, and then gave us a ride to a McDonalds. As a token of our appreciation, Wipeout and I bought them some Cokes.While eating supper at McDonalds, a disturbing thought entered my mind. I recalled something which I had said to the young man with the disfigured face after his humorous remark about not being able to smell. I had looked at him, nodding toward his face for emphasis, and said something like, "What's up with that? Did you get into a car accident?"The word I had used to describe his face was "that." Talk about a bad choice of a word. To describe his face with such a word depersonalized his face and rendered it merely as a object of curiousity or as a freakish entity.The word was spoken, however, in a context which hopefully did not offend the young man. He and his friend who was driving the vehicle were fast talkers. They hardly paused at all between sentences. When I had asked him about the cause of his injury, my words were uttered in a similarly quick manner. I did not say "What's up with THAT? There was no emphasis on the word, that. Instead, after sharing in the laughter after the young man's self deprecating remark, I conveyed my question about his face in a quickly spoken, matter of fact manner. That said, I regretted my choice of words.We thumbed rides back to the trail and hiked a short ways to the Route 501 shelter. There, I met a thru hiker named Pop Tart, in his twenties, who is a hammock camper. Whenever two hammock campers meet, an instant rapport happens.Tonight, I am sleeping in the hammock which is strung up within eyesight of the shelter.