Date: 2004-06-18
From: Georgia

To: Maine
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: scattered clouds

Mile 954Friday, June 18Front Royal, VANow it's the Center City Motel, a slightly seedy siesta and oral sexroom-by-the-hour joint in Front Royal, courtyard-style with a fiftiesneon sign announcing in blinking pink and green "Yes! We have airconditioning!" Here in Room Four, Spiceman & PG and I have all the trimmings, theunintentional M.C. Escher-esque pattern bedspreads and damn-near burlaptowels and spackle patches in the wallboard where some one or anotherpunched through and the Pakistani management has yet to catch up withbeige semi-gloss paint. Altogether not a bad place for a ragged-outhiker in need of a wall plug to charge digital camera batteries and layon the floor typing, feeling every bit a beached whale with PBR in easyreach and all naked but for silk SpongeBob Squarepants boxer shorts. But not a whale anymore. No! A man unrecognizable to himself, a"ripped" man, a model of wiry male musculature like some found objectsculpture, a man of wound wire and a head of rigid, razorback hog hair. PG on the phone to New Hampshire tells folks at home how she's thinkingabout hiring someone to carry her pack for her the rest of the trail. "'A little Incan warrior, perhaps," she says. Me on the bed writing incessant, trying to crank out this story beforethe next chapter begins, I chime in, singing a knock-off INXS tune,"Your own!.. personal!.. sherpa! Someone to heft your pack, someone tosmack!" Party Girl ignores me and goes back to her phone call. I keep forgetting that probably half my cultural references are lost onPG & Spiceman, as both were in diapers whilst Duran Duran and TheBangles were blinding adolescent me with science and strange Eightiessynth-pop tuneage fish. Whatever. Out here on the AT we are all ancient and immature, all sages and sillypunch-drunk saints, all lost boys and lovers and angels and outcasts,all growing and stumbling and trying, trying, trying, some dying ontheir feet, most dying to beat the if-nots and no-ways andgood-luck-you'll-never-make-its heaped upon us by a world of unceasingdoubt. Young and old, we the trekkers of this and other long-distancepathways in America and across the globe are ageless giants and heroesin our time. Though few of the general populous have any idea the AT even exists andeven fewer Wal-Mart shoppers will ever know that Spiceman or PG orMainesail, Mockingbird, Sox, Flatbed or Whiskey or me once stood uponthe cold stone pinnacle of Katahdin and said, "I did it!" it justdoesn't matter. I now know after three months of constant proximitywith vagabond giants that I, too, am a giant and the most regal ofvagabonds. And no home no matter how palatial will ever compare tothis 2000 mile living room we walk through and sleep in everyday. Notever. (Not at these prices, anyway!)But all that philosophical hogwash aside, I had a few facts to imparttonight. And they are as follows. For the record:- Yours truly got it in his head (after hearing the term from anotherthruhiker weeks ago) that "aquablazing," if for no other reason than itis such a cool sounding word, that aqua blazing the Shenandoah Mountains(rather than hiking them) would be really, really cool. He, that is tosay I, got it so firmly in his head that he quizzed and queried andlobbied every hiker within 50 miles of the Waynesboro YMCA in hopesthat someone or ones would be interested in joining him on saidadventure.- One Mike "Gravy" Brubaker (after first serving up a killer pro-bonohiker BBQ with his friend Korpi last Sunday) bent over backwards andforwards and performed logistical contortions of a superhuman kind tohelp me realize my river-blazing dream. Mike is a trail angel of thehighest order, one who not only comes out for a day and gives of hisfood and time to hungry hikers, but goes far beyond that. Mike droveall over hell & back to get us a canoe and get us on the river andferry us around for ample supplies and pick us up 75 river miles laterand deliver us to Fort Royal, leaving us at last with beer and Gatoradeand grapes and bananas and Pringles chips. His parting words to me: "Doing things like this, keeping up with you guys on the trail, ithelps build the anticipation for my trip two years from now. It's likeit allows me to do the hike from work." Many, many thanks, Mike.-Spiceman was lured entirely against his will into this mad aqua blazingact of piracy. Any and all blame for his apparent misconduct and grossdivergence from the strict AT white blaze code of honor should fall onOsama bin Laden, since said terrorist got off entirely too easily whenall the blame for his actions was suddenly and quite ironically foistedupon the Butcher of Baghdad and, with the aid of massive doses ofreality television and aquifer-introduced valium and soma, we were madeto forget him altogether. Bad Osama! How dare you make Spicemanaqua blaze with us! Bad, evil Osama!Okay, enough about that. -RSMFor the full story of Rick's journey, visit Jigglebox.com