Date: 2007-07-19
From: Vernon, NJ

To: Wildcat Shelter
Miles today: 17.3
Weather: light rain

I am a complete hedonist, plunging into every delightful sensation on the trail. This has its good and bad manifestations. We all have physical bodies and senses. From our earliest experiences to our most recent, we live through touch, smell, sight, and other senses hardwired to our brains. While there is a thoughtful, intellectual side to the trail, it is (for me) an experience where thought, the sensory middle man, can be largely eradicated and raw stimuli, such as the warmth of sun or the burn of exertion, exists for its own sake. That's not to say that I've become an animal out here (though some would disagree!). Rather, I'm living in a world dominated by phsyical experience. I've noticed that a good many hikers out here are very physically oriented -- they enjoy sports, for example. It's not an environment suited for the "brain-in-a-jar" types who lead internal, intellectual lives in air conditioned, unsedentary environments.Not to say that walking is thoughtless, as you can see in my earlier entries. Rather, I've found joy in the act of walking. I like the early morning when my head is free of thought, and my body is energized. I like the way my knees snap up and foreward, how my heels stretch towards the ground ahead, how my heart beats inside of my chest, and my rib cage raises with each breath. The AT Companion says that we have become hiking machines at this point. Though it sounds silly, the similarities are quite evident.I remember from my days as a competitive equestrian, experiencing the perfect physicality of a well-conditioned horse under saddle. The power, symmetry, and grace of a good horse travels through a rider, giving the human a parasitic and vicarious sense of what it is like to be a 1,200 pound bundle of coordinated muscle. I now know that feeling firsthand (not in a "beast of burden" sense alone!).The physical experiences of the trail cannot be fully separated from the intellectual or spiritual though. As with meditation or controlled breathing, our minds act in tandem with our bodies. Or, perhaps, they are victims of them. I've seen evidence of the opposite effect, too, where the mind can push the body up a difficult climb or through a high-mileage day. Despite this mental/physical connecton, it's amazing to be able to disengage the two and just be a body walking through the woods, if only for an hour or so in the early morning.NOAA called for some pretty crushing weather today -- heavy wind, rain, lightning, hail... the whole 9 yards. Iceman, Buffalo Bobby, and I got a hitch out of Vernon and were on the trail by 9ish. By the time I got to Warwick Turnpike, the sky was starting to look pretty unsettled. I ran into a cooler full of trail magic courtesy of Philmont's parents (thanks). While I was sitting on the cooler drinking an orange soda, Philmont's mom, Kathleen, walked in from the road with more sodas. I talked to her for a bit, and she told me that a pretty bad storm was going to hit the area around 2:00 in the afternoon. I looked at my Uncle Tom watch and saw that it was past 11:00. Hmmm.... that left me with less than 3 hours to traverse 8 miles of ridgeline with some crazy boulder strewn terrain. I checked my options: I could try to outrun the front and hope to be off ridgeline by the time the storm hit, or I could go back to wawayanda and hang out until the weather passed.I love this ridgeline section -- it's so fun, and though it's not at all technical, it does require climbing with both hands and feet. So, of course, I went for it, and off I ran (literally) down the trail. I passed a bunch of folks from the ATC conference who were dayhiking, and they must've thought I was nuts bombing down the trail with a mad glint in my eyes. A few of them tried to engage me in conversation, but I cut it short, saying that I wanted to get to Rt. 17A before the weather hit. I was on a mission!The ridge was AMAZINGLY fun. I ran, hoped, climbed, and crawled my way over it, pausing to take a photo of my foot placed on the New York/New Jersey state line marker. I'm not sure if I've ever had so much fun, and I felt great balancing on the boulders while the clouds scudded overhead.I trotted onto Rt. 17A just as the rain began to fall, and I was inside eating icecream at the Bellvale Creamery when the skys opened. Waterfall, who I passed en route to the road, came into the creamery soon after, and we moved our party out to an abandoned farmers market stand to wait out the storm. The stand had a green semi-transparent corrogated plastic roof which messed with our color vision. It was like a bad experiment in color therapy, and when I looked outside, everything took on a vivid magenta color. The weather cleared, and Waterfall packed up and took off while I opted to wait for the rest of my crew. On his way back to the trail, he ran into Snack Break and Splendora and told them that I was at Bellvale in the "produce section".Everyone made it off the wet, rocky ridge in one piece, but Snack Break busted her hand in a fall, and Iceman became "Ice Cubes" (Buffalo Bobby's term) by smashing his elbow open. The crew was in unusually high spirits after their trials on the wet granite though.Why is it that the toughest days are always the most fun?