Date: 2004-06-22
From: Georgia

To: Maine
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: overcast clouds

June 22, 04 Chef massages the upright piano in this historic hotel, obviously not under the best management, and so to our advantage. I mean, picturethe scene: a handful of thruhiker bums sitting in the lap of luxuryhere on the ridge high above the confluence of the Shenandoah & Potomacrivers where all this crazy Civil War shit went down, cannon fire,death, betrayal of brothers, mayhem, madness, and what's that? Archeopterix is a walking Civil War encyclopedia. He tells of theSouth taking siege of the Union armory RIGHT HERE! And Chef takes siege of the hotel bar, empty but for us, takes over thepiano and has us all groovin' to his quiet Zen talent, suddenlyunleashed (there aren't many pianos on the trail) and Party Girl &Spiceman sitting here and all of us drinking beers bought at the localdrug store and poured into bar glasses (procured by me from behind theunmanned bar) and used for the purpose of pleasing the management whowon't (naturally) allow us to supply our own alcohol.   Now the alleged bartender is in, though he has no customers. He'strying to explain the hotel policy, and manages to get one of our groupto pay for a drink, but otherwise my "grab your own glass" deal isworking. In now walk Don't Matter, Don't Mind, and their nephew Don'tBother. Very funny group of names. But with them come a family ofDon't Matter's.. (lost my train of thought there) The Shining. That's the comparison everyone is making here as we sitin this historic hotel and Chef on piano, and then Chef stops and Isay, "Hey, Chef, don't stop, man, we got something going here!" Butit's hard to translate to these guys the absolute anarchic beauty ofthis golden sunlit cliff top hotel moment and say "Keep it going!" andthe bartender who looks suspiciously like Joe Pesci keeps coming in anddiddling around behind the dead bar and saying how we gotta buy ourdrinks and that if the owner comes by we're all dead and kicked outathe place but who cares! This is Harper's Ferry and every one of us has walked a thousand milesto get here and wow! we oughta all be proud as tidal waves and typhoonsand peanut butter tycoons, every one of us, but of course neurosisabound, starting with Party Girl who ain't feeling too great cause shethinks she didn't do the right thing, didn't walk the last 12 milesinto town because of a few bad blisters on her feet and had to bedriven into town by the New Hampshire-ite caretakers of the BlackburnTrail Center, Bill and Sue who fed us a giant spag dinner with greenbeans and free sodas all around and bread pudding desert and let ussleep on the grand screened-in porch -wow! I go up to the bar and ask the woman now inventorying the booze &locking up cupboards what her name is and think I hear Genita. I askGenita how she is and she says "No, my name is Lenay." So I say "Okay,Lenay, what do you think of this? You got yourself a free pianoplayer, it's too bad you have no patrons." Lenay says she was tryingto ask if I needed a.. she'll be back in a minute. When she returns, Chef has quit the piano for the fifth or sixth time.Joe Pesci returns, and I talk him up awhile, feeling kind of bad for himand wanting to include him in our little scene, a kind of way ofthanking him for putting up with us. I marvel at the view and thelocation and the old historic building in general and ask if he knowswhat the last selling price for this place was. Pesci says 3.5million. Wow! You have to see this place to understand. I would buythis place at a loss. It sits atop a pinnacle hill far out and farabove everything here in the eastern tip of West Virginia, theShenandoah River churning by in shallow water far, far below in goldensunlight late afternoon, all of 7:30 pm now in late June.   I would buythis place for the view. I would buy this place to glue Chef's ass tothe piano seat and make him play for eternity whilst I type endlesslyon my portable keyboard to everyone's annoyance "All work and no playmake Jester a dull boy." Now it's pushups and talk of muscles and Chef is excited because hefinally has an ass and Spiceman says he has to admit that he admireshis calf muscles a lot nowadays. Me too. It's me doing the pushups. Hell, I'm 37, and it's kinda novel to be able to DO pushups and to beable to RUN down or up trails like a madman, down especially fun usingmy Leki poles to vault three and four feet at a time, hell, maybe more.I practically leapt into Harper's Ferry around two this afternoon. And lest I not get the V-shape upper torso thing going too As though in payment for the sin of bringing up that scary movie, I amnow transported to some weird fuckin sports bar with giant screen TVsporting horse races and video games of golf, all the usual bad andtacky MGD and Bud sports mirrors and on the big screen we have scoresfor "Tank Grrrl" and "Midway Girl" and I'm thinking, man, if we couldunleash the lioness in PG, it'd be Party Girl all the way winning 1000to 1! Here in this bad-taste bar or back in that great old historicbar, either way ,we are all one thousand to one. Each of us, to a manor woman, has stomped on the terra, in the sense that Lord Buckleymeant it, I am sure, and far, far beyond that. We have all walked athousand miles, and though I remain alone a man, a man alone on thetestosterone trail and Elly discovered today so very far ahead of meand tonight PG will curse me, jealous perhaps of my long call, such funsharing my joy with Mary in Texas, and they two, PG & Spice will betogether tonight, and I will rise in morning sick in wake of manic highand leave them both and go. Go! "Go roll your bones, alone!" Kerouac said. It is nonetheless agrand occasion I will never forget. -RSM For the full story of Rick's journey, visit Jigglebox.com