Date: 2004-05-16
From: Jenkins Shelter

To: Helveys Mill Shelter
Miles today: 14.3
Weather: light rain

Breaking camp early, I flushed two turkeys at separate locations at very close range. I walked until I could turn down to Bland, VA. Shortly before reaching Route 52, I came upon a solitary trail crew worker resting from attacking the earthen bank and broadening the trail. He had been doing this work for two days. Not far from him was an array of white gallon jugs containing store-bought spring water. This was trail magic and I filled up my water containers. It was just a lucky day. Shortly after I had turned south on Route 52 for the long walk into Bland I was picked up by a nice older couple who deposited me at the IGA. I did not get the burger I was yearning for at the Dairy Queen, because they told me the Dairy Queen was a mile in an odd direction. I bought some food of marginal nutritional value (Snickers bars, Oreos, cheese crackers with peanut butter) along with a quart of grape Gatorade which I downed in one go in the alley beside the store.Walking out of Bland, I didn¢t get far up Route 52 before I was greeted by T. E. Mallor (if the name on the mailbox applied to the man), a 94-year-old man who was out on a Sunday afternoon watering his porch plants. The porch, and the house it was nailed to, was one hundred years old. In the forty-five minutes I would stand there listening to Mr. Mallor, I would learn a lot of things. He was hard of hearing, so it wasn¢t exactly a conversation, and he had the ordinary desire of the elderly to talk and to pass on information. He told me he graduated from college in 1934 and had come to Bland in 1935 to work with the Extension Service. He told me that four Iowa buckeye trees stood in the field across the road, and that the concrete bridge built in that same field was illegal and prone to back up, flooding the lawn of the people downstream. He knew some things about geology, which I found especially interesting, although I had no power to question him. His main geological theme was that geology accounted for the spate of ¢bushy mountains¢ in that area. The geology, that is, was not suitable to support large timber. He told me about how recently someone had flipped a car over in his lawn, tearing down his fence. Although I was worried about a thunderstorm as this interview began, it lasted so long that the storm clouds had passed completely by the time he accepted my good wishes and let me go.As I walked up Route 52 I was walking parallel to I-77 and saw the signs along the highway for Bluefield. It was only these signs that assured me I was on the right road up to the AT. I knew this stretch of I-77 from the highway itself, because road trips from Illinois to Roanoke always took us down I-77 to Wytheville to I-81, which we then took north. The AT approached Wytheville from the southwest, and by Bland hikers had already given Wytheville a wide berth on their way to Pearisburg to the north.As I was pondering such things, another car stopped and clearly I was meant to get in. The car was driven by a woman, who turned out to be a hiker in a rental car, and the other occupants included Archyopterix and Rooster. All three of them had just returned from Damascus and were resuming the hike at Bland, where they had left off. The trunk held their packs, but mine fit across my lap and extended somewhat into Rooster¢s. The woman let us all off, accepted our change, and the three of us were soon off and walking. However, I wasn¢t walking as fast as the other two men and wasn¢t going to try. We made the long walk down the paved road and under I-77. Archyopterix and Rooster had already entered the woods, and were taking water from a spring, when I met ¢the Lord Duke¢ for the first and last time. I left everyone filtering water and made the steep climb up the mountain. Helveys Mill Shelter was about half a mile back a blue-blaze trail, but the setting was flat, piney, and generally beautiful. It was beautiful place to pitch a tent, and some four or five hikers did so, but I ended up in the shelter. A hiker called ¢Epiphaneous¢ was off getting water from the stream far down the mountain when Rooster and Archyopterix joined me and ¢Dave,¢ a fifty year-old yachtsman whom I had passed earlier in the day.The talk among the shelter group was good and dominated by Archyopterix and Dave. Much of it concerned New Zealand and Dave¢s adventures. Hiking boots were also topical. I initiated this conversation by asking Archyopterix how he was liking his German boots, which he said were suiting him just fine.