Date: 2017-10-30
To: View Entry
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: clear sky

When I started hiking the Appalachian Trail back in the olden days, before cell phones went digital, staying in touch meant calling home from pay phones in towns. They looked like the photo in the upper left. You found them roadside at gas stations and in the entrances of grocery stores ¢ places with lots of ambient noise ¢ and either fed them coins or used a phone calling card. When I spoke with Tom, I would tell him when I expected to be in the next town, but not to panic if I were a day or two late.  It never happened, but if I had failed to reappear in timely fashion or if Tom had needed to get in touch with me between towns for a true emergency, he knew he could call the Appalachian Trail Conservancy and they would pass on information to the appropriate agency who would then try to locate me. Here¢s an example of how that works. In the late 1990¢s, I met a forest ranger at a road crossing in the George Washington & Jefferson National Forests in Virginia. He asked if I had seen a thru-hiker named Copper Top, distinguished by his flaming red hair. I had passed him when he was stopped for lunch a couple of miles back. His father had suffered a sudden and serious illness, and his family was trying to get Copper Top back home quickly. The rangers had narrowed down where Copper Top was on the Trail by knowing where he was when he last phoned home and by checking for his entries in the shelter registers. What are shelter registers?Maintaining clubs place registers in shelters for hikers to record their observations and comments. They are most often black and white marble composition notebooks, protected from the weather by a plastic bag. Before cell phones, they were the primary way how you learned who was hiking ahead of you and hikers behind you found out about you. The entries were often simple, ¢In for a break, hiking on. Smeagol 7/15/95,¢ or provided useful information like, ¢Spring in front of shelter is dry, but follow the forest road 2/10¢s behind the shelter to an excellent piped spring. Igor 9/3/97,¢ or might be a warning, ¢Caution: Yellow jacket nest 1 mile north flagged in red. Hives 8/2/02.¢ There might also be complaints about the weather, the condition of the trail, and even one¢s fellow hikers who might have the temerity to snore or make other noises at night.  The language could be colorful, sometimes accompanied by illustrations.  In 2005, I hiked up from Georgia to the Appalachian Trial Conservancy Biennial Meeting held at East Tennessee University in Johnson City. In the Cherokee National Forest in Tennessee, I met three young men standing alongside the trail who didn¢t seem like they belonged there. They were wearing blue jeans and cotton shirts, which just isn¢t done since cotton weighs a ton when wet and holds moisture against the skin, and seemed as though they were somewhere else, high as kites but not in a mellow marijuana way. I had noticed an empty blue Mallinckrodt ether drum down in a nearby cove, and had found several ignition tubes (thick walled test tubes) in a shelter fire pit. I wrote a warning to hikers in the next shelter register. An enforcement ranger from the Cherokee National Forest found me at my meeting and wanted complete descriptions. She asked about their teeth, which were rotten. I didn¢t know, but I¢ve since read that extensive tooth decay often accompanies methamphetamine use. I still don¢t know how they found me based solely on my trail name in the register.Today, carrying a cell phone is nearly universal on the Appalachian Trail, and pay phones have gone the way of rotary dial telephones and slide rules. My older brother was a leading pay phone engineer in the 1990¢s. The advent of cell phones and the disappearance of pay phones led to his unemployment. Imagine being a buggy whip maker in 1908 when the Ford Model T debuted. It didn¢t matter how elegant his designs; no one wanted a pay phone anymore. At least the Amish still use buggy whips. They may also use cell phones, with the permission of their local bishop.Cell phones are usually turned off or placed in airplane mode to conserve battery life, but most hikers will check them daily for messages and to let folks back home know that all is well. They are also used among hikers to arrange meetings and get togethers. I used to think that the casual use of cell phones on the trail was a bad thing, an invasion of the sanctity of the woods, but I came to see them as actually enhancing the community of hikers. I¢m still enough of a Luddite to shun most social media.  Cell phone coverage is not universal. There are many blank areas on the coverage maps, which at any rate tend to exaggerate signal strength. Verizon seems to offer the best coverage. There is usually a strong enough signal to be had somewhere most days, often from the higher ridges or viewpoints. There are areas, notably northern Virginia and Maine, where signals are rare. At Loft Mountain Campground in Shenandoah National Park, for example, reception can be found only at certain seats in the amphitheater and, as I discovered this year, in tenting area 45-50. A small percentage of hikers carry a SPOT or other satellite messaging system that can send out an ¢all¢s well¢ message to friends, summon help in an emergency, or even provide real-time tracking on a map. Hikers attempting to set records often carry such a device to document their hikes, although it really only proves that the device hiked the entire trail and not the hiker. The latest generation SPOT Satellite GPS Messenger weighs only four ounces and costs about $150, but requires a $200 yearly subscription.  Smart phones have more uses than just communication. I use mine as a camera, a watch, a GPS-based navigation system, and for recording my entries for copying and pasting into this journal.  I also download e-books. I carry a 10,000 milliamp hour external battery weighing 6.3 ounces that will recharge my iPhone three times, more than enough to get to the next town.  Other popular uses, just not by me, are for music and audio books, and it is increasingly common to see hikers plugged in while hiking. I still find that disturbing, to a greater degree than seeing people walking down city streets holding conversations with invisibles.Even with cell phones, most hikers feel a tension between life on the trail and life off the trail. I¢ve often heard younger hikers speak of their trail lives and their real lives, as though they are separate things. Hikers who abandon their thru-hikes are referred to in the past tense, like they had died. ¢Twisted Elf was a good person and a strong hiker. I¢ll miss her.¢ All that¢s missing is a somber ¢may the souls of the faithfully departed rest in peace¢ and a recitation of the 23rd Psalm. Sometimes staying in touch with loved ones only makes you feel further away.  One thing I¢ve observed in myself is that the longer I¢m out on a hike, the less interest I have in news, other than the weather, which becomes a compulsive interest. Many times in trailside hotel rooms, I find myself watching the Weather Channel for hours at a time, hoping that the forecast for rain and more rain is magically going to change to clear and cool if I just keep watching. I am tempted to avoid all news during this thru-hike and then see how long it takes me to re-immerse afterwards. I missed the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War in 1967 when I was on an island in Casco Bay, Maine participating in an oceanography program after my junior year of high school. I would like to miss more wars.