Date: 2011-05-06
From: 5.7 miles before Wapiti Shelter

To: Holiday Motor Lodge, Pearisburg
Miles today: 22.4

(In which I sleep in a gym)It's another cold night, and I spend the night in my tent (held up with a thick, appropriately sized stick), in various states of dream and semi-consciousness. Eager to get moving and warm up, I get out of my sleeping bag at 6am and am hiking before sunrise.Walking through a rhododendron thicket I find a straight, branchless stick on the ground, thicker than my remaining walking stick but surprisingly light. When I try to break it down to the right size I find that it is vastly stronger than the dried branches I had tried yesterday, and I have to work hard to break it. The thicker stick is easier to grip and it hardly flexes at all when I put pressure on it -- no more than the now broken carbon fiber poles did. After walking with both sticks for a while I find the original thinner stick from yesterday to be unsatisfying flimsy and I leave it resting against a tree, and continue hiking using only the rhododendron stick.* * *Stopping to visit a viewpoint, I meet a new hiker admiring the view. He stands out from other hikers, dressed in a camouflaged t-shirt and boots, khaki shorts, and a wide brimmed hat of the sort you might expect to be made of straw. When I get to the ledge I whistle, impressed. "Yeah, sure is a nice view", the hiker says. He speaks with a lisp, and I have to listen carefully to catch all of his words. He introduces himself as Tree Beard, from Iowa, and I recall him from a story Tippy-Toes told me. As she tells it, Tree Beard got off at the Gainesville bus terminal and started walking the 30 miles to the AT approach trail. Locals, seeing a strange, bearded man with red fuel canisters dangling from his pack, called the sheriff's department to alert them about this potential terrorist. The officer, hearing his story, drove Tree Beard all of the way to the approach trail, performing some trail magic and getting Tree Beard out of his jurisdiction in one fell swoop.I ask him if he's planning on going to the hostel and he shakes his head. "I'm not much for hostels or towns", he says, confirming Tippy-Toes' description of his habits. "I'll go in to resupply, but I like to get back out in the woods. Any day out here in the woods is a good day." I ask him if he knows the mileage to the hostel, my Kindle battery having died, taking my guidebooks and maps with it. He shakes his head, offering to go retrieve his pack with the data book in it, a stripped down version of the standard guidebook that most hikers carry. "I don't usually read about what's coming up", he explains, "it takes some of the adventure out of things". I'm usually the same way, I say, but sometimes when it starts raining it's nice to know how far it is to the next shelter. He nods. "It's like most things, it has its advantages and disadvantages", he says. "But a lot of hikers, knowing that it's two miles to the next shelter will keep hiking to it and will miss out on views like this", he says, gesturing to the sweeping panoramic landscape below us. He's articulated my hiking philosophy as well as I could, and beneath his hillbilly appearance and speech impediment I find him to be one of the more thoughtful and well-reasoned hikers on the trail.* * *Hiking the day after a thirty-plus miler is, once again, a tiring activity, and I am glad that it is only twelve miles from my camp site to the hostel. The day is cold and I keep my jacket on as I hike. When I finally arrive at the hostel, half a mile off of the trail, I find three hikers sitting around the unheated, open-air bunk house. Bunks are up the ladder, they say, shower is outside, and if you smell they ask that you shower before entering the house. This policy makes sense to me, and I know that I stink, but taking an outdoor shower -- even a heated one -- in this weather does not sound like my idea of fun and I decide to stay out in the bunkhouse for now, cold though it may be. I ask about shuttles to town, but surprisingly there don't seem to be any. "I think there's a number you can call if you're willing to pay", one of the hikers says. A sign on the board lists the fare as $8 per hour and 25 cents per mile. While I could afford this, I do not relish the idea of paying to be driven somewhere I will be walking to on the trail so soon. I ask about food and the hikers report that, while there is normally a nightly dinner, a couple of busy days have exhausted the proprietors and they have decided to cancel tonight's meal. They do, I am glad to find, have a refrigerator full of sodas and snacks, with a jar to pay by the honor system, and I quickly down a soda, a juice, two granola bars and three candy bars. Still, having anticipated a ride into town, the snacks are unfulfilling. I ask about laundry, and when the hikers point to the washboards leaning outside of the bunkhouse, I make up my mind.I stay long enough to revive my Kindle and mentally prepare to hike more miles on what I had planned as my half-day off. While I wait, Neville, one of the two hostel proprietors comes out of the house. She looks remarkably like the actress Keri Russell, and the resemblance continues as I watch her mannerisms, assuming that Keri Russell is shorter, cuter, and even more friendly in person than her on-screen persona. Neville takes time to learn the name of every hiker and tries to put each at ease. Explaining apologetically about the lack of dinner and busy last few days, she flops theatrically down to lie on the ground, the picture of exhaustion.The hostel and Neville's personal touch are the perfect example of the welcoming, consistent personality I found missing from Damascus. But with the anticipation of town food still on my mind and in my stomach, I realize that, while necessary, this personality is not sufficient. Sorry to leave but unwilling to put a hot meal and hot indoor shower off for another day, I set out hiking again, back toward the trail. "Bye Portrait!" Neville calls out after me, standing on her tiptoes and waving as I walk down the driveway. "Thanks for stopping by!"* * *Pearisburg is another ten miles away, and the lure of food is enough to convince me to keep going, but I hike purposely, rather than out of pleasure as I usually do, and I let my mind wander away from the trail to get as much of a mental break from hiking as I can. When I see a sign with an arrow that says, "View, 50 yards", I have to stop and assess whether the side trail really is no more than 150 feet long and whether it is worth it. I do visit the viewpoint, but my heart isn't in it and I quickly return to the trail.Walking from the trail in to Pearisburg, up a busy four lane road with no sidewalk, I reach the motel around 7pm. There are no more regular rooms, the motel clerk explains, but if I'm interested I can stay on a cot in the weight room for $18. For that price I say yes sight unseen, and when I see the room I am even more tickled at my luck. It is a hotel room filled with various pieces of expensive workout equipment, and includes a bathroom with a steam-bath shower and doctor's-office style weight and height scale. I decide to forgo the cot, choosing instead the padded, vibrating massage table, and the hotel maid brings me clean sheets and makes the table up like a bed for me.Before I do anything else I take a long, luxurious shower. Next I head to the grocery store, where I attempt to buy as much but no more than necessary for the next four days, having learned from my grocery excesses in Damascus that led to me not having to resupply for more than 160 miles. While eating hot food first is tempting, I make a habit of buying groceries first, getting the most important town chores done first so that I am ready to leave town as quickly as possible if need be.Finally, I head to Pizza Plus for an order of garlic bread, curly fries, a Doctor Pepper and a slice of turtle pie. Eating it back in my gym, the meal is everything I dreamed it would be, worth every mile.With good food and a warm, potentially vibrating bed, I feel certain that I have not gone wrong in heading to Pearisburg.