Date: 2004-06-05
From: Scorched Earth

To: Mackerel-gray
Miles today: 17.5

I ignored the first drop. I thought little of it. I didn¢t think much of the second or the third. When a few more fell, I told myself it was only a late night drizzle, nothing to get concerned about. I don¢t mind the drizzle, I just don¢t like rain. Then a few more drops fell, heavier ones. Then more. I took the garbage bag and poncho and arranged them over my sleeping bag, forming a slipshod barrier. I was thoroughly soaked before the sun rose, not that it was a scenic dawn or anything.        Saturday was one of those mackerel-gray days marked by unremitting rain. It was the sort of day you forget when reminiscing about your youth, the sort of day you expect to hear bad news on, the sort when you can¢t help but to feel a little depressed even if everything is going eight for you.         I needed no further reasons to be miserable, yet I got one anyway. I couldn¢t find my map. I must have dropped it the night before when I was getting a drink or resting on a log. God only knew how far back it was, and I knew I wasn¢t willing to walk back for it. I wasn¢t sure which I felt worse about: having to walk the last 28-some miles without any idea of what landmarks or shifts in terrain lay ahead or that I littered.         I threw on my pack. I forced my swollen feet into my soggy boots. I cursed everything around me. Nothing seemed to care.Like Water for BlistersNow that I was without a map, I no longer had the luxury of periodically stopping to check my location in relation to landmarks. This actually improved my travel time significantly, even if I unconsciously grasped in my empty pocket for an excuse to rest for a moment. It did, though, have its drawbacks.        For example, I managed to reach the Leroy Smith Shelter around noon, just when the rain gathered its strength into a solid downpour. Someone left a weather radio here, so I had something to listen to while I ate my turkey Spam and raw ramen. Before leaving, I decided to follow the sidetrails marked with an arrow that said, ¢SPRING.¢        If I had a map, I would have made a better decision here. You see, the spring turned out to be (according to my second map of the area, the one I gave to the grandparents back in Port Clinton ) 0.46 miles away. A half-mile seems a lot longer when you¢re walking in the rain on sore feet, and even more so when it¢s only half of a round-trip. To add perspective, think of it as a one-hour errand when you¢re already working 18-20 hours a day. I would have figured, hell, I have enough water, and it¢s not like I¢m going to dehydrate in this weather.         But alas, I had no map. I made this trip, filled up the Gatorade bottle, and pressed on through the driving rain. A sign said I had 14.5 miles to go to reach the Kirkridge Shelter, my only hope of a dry place to sleep. Red Scab of CourageFrom what I could remember, the only real shift in elevation I had coming up was something called the Wind Gap. I didn¢t know if it was a town or a road or a creek. I hoped it was a town. A nice town, with a Wawa or a Turkey Hill gas station not too far from the trail. The kind of place I could get a good chicken-cesar-and-bacon hoagie with extra cheese, a king-sized Snickers bar and a Mountain Dew Live Wire. I dreamed of nothing else. Well, except for finding a good diner, one with big juicy cheeseburgers cooked rare. The ramen noodles cut my gums up pretty badly; I wanted to taste blood and know it wasn¢t my own.         Dreams don¢t come true on mackerel-gray days. This was no exception. Wind Gap probably is a decent little borough; I don¢t know because the trail passes just past its northern outskirts. All I saw was a mobile home park. Too bad none of them thought of opening up a snack stand in their trailer, because I was hungry enough to pay ridiculously inflated prices for a few candy bars.         The white blazes led up a steep hill. I walked up the better part of a mile before sitting on a rock on the side of the road. I opened a pack of instant Mac-N-Cheese, swallowed the cheese powder, and started chewing on the pasta. But I heard a loud noise over the sound of my own crunching.        A rotund man in a clear-gray poncho was ambling down the hill, each step accompanied by the clanging of several pots. I kid you not, this man had more cookery hanging off his backpack than I have in my whole kitchen. The backpack itself was huge and overstuffed to the point it made my first pack look like a third-grader¢s bookbag. He stopped and asked me how far it was to the next town, if they had access to a road, and if there were any hotels on the way. I answered while crunching the raw macaroni, telling him I didn¢t see a hotel but there could be one in the town. I tried to stress, as much as possible, that I didn¢t actually know.        He shouted my answers back up the hill. His companion, a man who¢s only protection against the rain was a brimmed hat and a backpack taller than he was, responded. Cookery-man went down the hill as hat-man (geez, I wish I found out what their names were) told me how they had come from the Kirkridge shelter that morning, how it taken them from nine a.m. to the time I met them (around 6 p.m.) to make it this far. He also said both he and his friend had sprained both of their ankles on the ¢rocks steep enough to rock climb¢ and the nonstop barrage of stones on the trail.        I kept my head tilted forward as he talked, letting the rain pour off the overhanging hood of my poncho as I stared at the large red scab on my shin. I couldn¢t help to grin as hat man went on about how horrible the path up ahead was. I hoped these guys weren¢t headed for the Lehigh Gap; if they were, I hoped they would encounter someone kinder than myself who could tell them they had no idea what rocky trails were. How they only managed about nine miles in nine hours while going downhill was a mystery to me.        As I watched them head down the hill towards Wind Gap*, I suddenly realized how far I had come myself. I was no longer the heavily encumbered pie-eyed overencumbered tenderfoot who forced his way up Peter¢s Mountain. My naivety had been washed away by thousand of raindrops. My pack had been lightened by experience. My feet and ankles ... I no longer acknowledged any feelings below my knees. My bitter psychological pains ... I¢ll never fell anything else until those wounds are healed, but that¢s not relevant. Despite all my whining and bellyaching, I was handling this one pretty well. I had toughened up considerably.        With nothing more to do, I finished off my pasta and headed north, hoping I could manage nine more miles before collapsing.Hiking Out of Time With Wind Gap behind me, I had only one notable landmark left ahead and that was the Wolf Rocks. I assumed this was what hat-man was talking about. I could only remember one thing from my map about this site: The Wolf Rocks marked the southernmost point of glaciation during the last Ice Age.        If I may digress for a bit, I¢d like to say this may be one of the most historically interesting sites on the trail. Some 18,000 years ago, all of Canada and everything north of the rocks, and also all of Europe north of the Alps, was covered in moving sheets of ice. While this spelled doom for much of the flora in northern Europe, the Appalachian Mountains had just enough gaps to allow the plants and wildlife to slip through and set up new habitats further south. That¢s why you¢ll find more biodiversity in the Smoky Mountains (a small part of the Appalachians about 250 miles south of where I was) than you will in all of northern Europe.**        Another side effect of glaciers is that they left huge, jagged boulders everywhere they went. Some of the granite chunks they left around my hometown (New Castle, PA) were easily the size of tanks. And, mind you, I¢m talking about M26 Perishing tanks, not an M8 Buford you can strap a parachute to. No, these were testaments to mountains slip-slide melting for thousands of miles. If the Wolf Rocks could compare, I was in for one final challenge. The very thought of it sent adrenaline into my bloodstream.         If it was too bad, I told myself, I¢d have to make camp close to them. There was no point to breaking my leg this late in the trip, not when I had so much time to spare. Still, if I could do it I¢d do it. So I pressed on, hiking as the descended through the woods. The rain didn¢t stop.         About an hour after dark the trail curved sharply. I couldn¢t see the next blaze. I also couldn¢t make out a clear beaten path through all of the rocks. While looking, though, I did see a nice dry niche created by an overhanging rock. I considered sleeping there, but hten thought, no I should find the shelter. Then I lost both the rock and the last white blaze. Finally I found both and decided that just as there was no point to breaking a leg this late in the trip, there was also no point in getting hopelessly lost.         I grit my teeth, ready to bear the elements for one more night. *I've since found out there is a hotel in Wind Gap, so don't feel too bad about those guys.I'm sure they had a better place to sleep that night than I did. **But you better hurry if you want to see it. The thousands of different species of flowers, trees, plants, amphibians, mammals, fish, mosses, reptiles, spiders, fungi and butterflies that survived the Ice Age in the Smokies are all going extinct at a rapid rate due to pollution, poachers, careless visitors and non-native species moving in. There will barely be any survivors from the Ice Age left there in about 50 years.