Date: 2004-10-14
From: Campsite near US201

To: Cloud Pond Lean-to
Miles today: 14.9
Weather: broken clouds

We hitched ahead, again, this time to Monson. It was always my intention to hitch ahead when we hit October 10, thinking that we could still make Katahdin by the fifteenth that way. I¢m still really worried about the time and weather factor. Katahdin continues to be my driving motivation, whether or not that¢s right. We could have made it to Monson hiking in about the time it took us to hitch here, but we¢re both really feeling the effects of lack of adequate nutrition. There was no place to resupply in Caratunk, and knowing that our mail drop was waiting for us in Monson was definitely a motivation. It would have been two more long days without food to Monson, doable, but difficult. And we would have had to leave the tenth instead of camping and hanging out with Knuckles and Underhill. How do I feel about it? I have mixed feelings, I suppose. I started as a purist, but I only intended to stay a purist as long as I could swing it. And I was the purist of the pure, whiter than snow, all the way through Connecticut, every white blaze. And then it stopped mattering. Of course, a lot of people at that point would have gone home, but the trail started to mean something else to me then, something more than another of my ridiculous quests for perfection.That¢s what I¢m always doing, searching for perfection, and the trail was an easy way to do that: pass every white blaze, from Georgia to Maine, stand atop Katahdin, and you win. You¢re perfect. You¢ve done it. I think that would have been more damaging to me than not¢maybe not, maybe that¢s just sour grapes, and that¢s what the perfectionist in me says¢but my core self knows that part of this trip was needing to fail, and needing to accept my failure in order to truly succeed. I have to be okay with my imperfection. I have to be okay with my whole self. I have to be okay with letting life take me where it will instead of trying to force life to be what I want it to be, instead of trying to make it in my own image. I can¢t enforce control on the outside world. I can¢t. I can¢t make the world into a rigidly structured system, the system that would finally, once and for all, make me happy. I have to be happy with the world as it is, an imperfect, beautiful, tragically flawed place. Just like the trail is imperfect and beautiful, perfect in its imperfection. That¢s how I must be: content to be perfectly beautiful, perfect in my own imperfection.That¢s what County has taught me, among other things: he is so at peace with the trail, so at peace with himself, with his own accomplishments, his whole self, whether he succeeds or as I term it, ¢fails.¢ To hitch twenty miles is not a failure in his mind. It just is. It not only is; it was what was meant to be.So we made it to Monson in two hitches¢the distance around by road was far greater than the distance by trail, so that was something of an accomplishment. Coming into the town we saw a bunch of hippie hiker trash hanging out outside of town, hitching¢with two dogs, playing a guitar. It was Gordy and Li¢l Munchkin and company, whom we hadn¢t seen in ages¢not since Palmerton, Pennsylvania. They had just summitted Katahdin and hitched back to Monson, where Kaia, Munchkin¢s dog, had stayed with Lindy, the massage lady. The politics in Monson are weird¢there¢s Shaw¢s, which is expensive, although legendary. It was the one other place, other than the Doyle, where County had wanted to stay on the trail, so we could get one of the legendary 1-2-3-4 breakfasts. But it¢s $20 a night, per person, plus food expenses¢way out of our budget at this point. The Pie Lady, Shaw¢s archrival and nemesis, went out of business this summer, so aside from another B&B, there are no hostels in Monson. Which is where Lindy the massage lady came in¢she rescued three poor thru-hikers from rain at the laundromat sometime this summer, three who were too impoverished to afford Shaw¢s and were planning to hike out.Instead she let them stay in the apartment at the back of the house she just bought, one big room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. Everything a hiker needs. She had even let hikers go to town with paint on the one wall of the bedroom, and hikers of all different stripes had turned the whole wall into a piece of exquisite artwork with Katahdin at the end. It was free to stay there¢everyone who stayed did a little work to help her out¢and it¢s where the underclass of hikers had been staying all summer. We had heard about her before we got there, but it was just as wonderful as it had been described to us. Gordy and Li¢l Munchkin referred us to her, too¢and we told them we¢d see them on the PCT next year¢¦Lindy welcomed us to her house and gave us some work to do¢then we raided her hiker box. Hikers coming into Monson get huge mail drops to last them through the 100-Mile Wilderness, so her cupboards were full with hiker food. We made a huge stone soup of sorts in the crock pot, just for us. The barbecue in town didn¢t take credit cards, which was all the money we had left, so it was us, the hiker box, and the gas stations. Our meal was delicious. It felt so good just to eat after days of not having enough. We heard it was going to storm the next day, which did not bode well for us getting to Katahdin by the fifteenth¢we thought if we left the eleventh and did the 100-Mile in five days we could just make it. I had wanted to try to do that¢five twenties in a row, just because I hadn¢t, and I thought it would be good practice for the PCT. But laziness won out. We rested the day it stormed, because it was too nasty to hike, and rested the next day when the sun came out and it was perfectly warm and beautiful, because it was too nice to hike. So two zeroes later, Lindy drove us to the trail, cutting off a couple of miles on a woods road, just so we¢d get out of there. It was a beautiful day, but we¢re just worn out.Both of us are feeling ready to be done. We¢re ready for this adventure to be over. It¢s taken me two months longer than it takes the average thru-hiker, and County one month longer¢just in terms of time, if not mileage, we¢re ready to be done. I¢m ready to be someplace I can consider home for a while, ready to not be kicked out of bed every morning, ready to just rest for real. And ready to be comfortable with my imperfection. We made it up the Barren Ledges and had a long break in the sun, looking out on the Maine landscape. I think Maine, more than anything, has changed me. We stopped at the Cloud Pond Lean-to, .3 off the trail, and hoped we would have it to ourselves, but two sectioners who hope to thru-hike next year showed up. I¢m not sure they believed the advice given to them by two beat-up thru-hikers who weren¢t even going to make it to Katahdin by October 15, but they should. It made me understand the people who go back to Springer every March to hike with the hopeful neophytes. So much hope, so much excitement, so much to learn! I remember myself back then and I feel like I was an infant, just entering the world. I¢m so much older and wiser now. Wise enough to know what I need to do and what I don¢t. I can only hope that wisdom translates into the rest of my life.