Date: 2003-06-12
From: Duncannon

To: Peters Mt Shelter
Miles today: 11.3

By arrangement, Ben (Just Do It) knocks on my Doyle door early. It is barely light.I dress quietly, as Turnaround is still sleeping. It's her last day, so I don't want to disturb her.For the first time since late April, my feet set up a chorus of howls as I bid them to enter the shoes. "No! Not the shoes! Anything but the shoes!"Shhhhh!I try to placate them, console them, win them over with logic and promise. "Really, we're going up into the HILLS. There will be NO MORE muck today. We'll be walking on ROCKS.""C'mon, it will be great."At the mention of not-muck, they perk right up and consent to enter their dank dungeons.Feet, they're such innocents. They'll believe anything.Actually, they have good reason to object. My shoes reek, and they are still damp despite my best efforts at airing. My feet are chafed and peeling from the constant immersion.My left pinkie toe is swollen fat and red, and sometimes feels like a hot poker is stabbing it. It has a deep crack at it's base. I do my best to keep that scrupulously clean, but its a tough environment. I hope it is not getting infected. Ben gives me some kind of special pink "menthol solution" made only in a little pharmacy in Dayton, TN. It's his cure-all. It gives a strange sensation, burning then cooling. But I believe it is helping.I join Ben and Itchy Foot for breakfast at the cafe across the street. As we are eating, Crow comes in. Crow started on March 1 too. I'm glad to see another Pack 31-er our here. I'm not the lollygager-ist either: Wench, Hotdog, Fly and Smoothie are still a day or so behind me.When we get out of the cafe, Turnaround is up, sitting at the picnic table on the columned second porch. She waves at us as we cross the street. This feels like college-after-hours, especially after "the dorms" and hallways of the Doyle.I give Turnaround a big hug and bid her farewell and many future adventures. I hope she lets us all know when she summits Katahdin in a few weeks. I will surely miss her broad smile, good humor and infectious laugh. Perhaps our paths will cross again in adventure, perhaps not. But my hike has been better for knowing her. Ben, Itchy Foot and I start out through the AT town walk, which is fascinating. If Boiling Springs is a village from another century, Duncannon seems like a town from the 1940s. The houses butt up close to the street, and the yards are full of hosta, peonies and roses spilling over yard fences.We cross out of town over the Susquehanna bridge, and it is indeed mighty and wide. Murky too. I keep close contact with my camera - anything dropped on the pedestrian walkway would fall down to the brown, swollen river and be gone forever.We start up the flank of the next ridge, battling the humidity. The climb is not hard at this point, though I know it would have killed me six weeks earlier. We cross huge chunks of what appears to be concrete, mossy and eroded so the pebbles show. Just Do It tells me it's not concrete, it's puddingstone. Itchy Foot said it was formed on the bottom of an ocean, and that there is a park named after this type of stone. We walk along a knife edge ridge, and I DO mean knife edge. The mountains in this part thrust up at an angle. The infamous PA rocks are beginning, but they still look like VA rocks to me.We take a break at the first shelter for a snack. In walks Better Day, a southbounding section hiker, who willing carries my empty milk bottle and banana trash back to town. Simple kindnesses among hikers. The shelter spacing in this area is funky, so it is a short day. We get there at 1:30 pm. This seems too early and I would like to hike on, but we are already in a light rain with thunderstorms predicted. The next shelter is 13 miles away. Guess I'm a shelter gal until this "stationary eddy" rain returns to sporadic. I am delighted to see that Peters Mountain is a huge, lovely shelter with a covered porch and a loft. It turns out to be a lovely stay. I nap first, then eat, then read my book, then eat some more. The group chatters away, merry. I sense a real esprit de corps forming. Just Do It and Itchy Foot bring up enough water for Cindy and me. These little kindnesses mean a lot - the water is a long way down.I'm glad I stayed. It feels as if I am away at camp with my friends. Or at college... By night's end, there are 25 camped on the shelter grounds, including a tiny log overflow shelter said to have been built by AT thru-hike pioneer Earl Schaffer. Just Do It, our resident pyro, gets a campfire cranking. Here tonight are me, Ben, Itchy Foot, John and Jackie Not-The-Kennedy's, Commander in Chief, Crow, Notes, Hoser, Texas Jack, FidiDido, P.Willy, Don, Dirty Bird, SunPig, Wade a sectionhiker, Michele and another fellow whose name I didn't catch, and maybe others. And then, a huge surprise! In walks the Five Alive, five great young kids who also started on March 1 with me! Diesel, Emily (Speck), her sister SlickRock, Oopu, and Ketchup. They've picked up a sister, Cire.We take a group picture of Pack 31, including Crow, seven folks who started on 3/1/03. Way back on Day Three in March, our last night in Gooch Gap together, we also had a campfire. Diesel played his backpacker guitar. Emily (Speck) rang out with her gorgeous, powerful voice, and her friends wove fantastic harmonies. And so it happened again. They started out with their "theme song," the rollicking Dixieland Delight by Alabama... "hold her tight, a little loving, a little turtle doving, my Dixieland Delight..."Then they played a song that they'd played that first campfire, "Open The Eyes of My Heart," a song that reminded me of my friend Ted, a seeker. It choked me up the second time too.Lots of music, lots of tomfoolery, lots of laughs. Yeah, just like college days...And shortly after "quiet time" settled upon the shelter, the thunder rumbled and the rain, yes rain, came down.