Date: 2015-08-23
From: Andover, Maine

To: Grafton Notch, ME
Miles today: 79.0

Box Turtle speaking again this morning, hopefully with more effectiveness than the last entry from Rangeley. As happened once before, the library time limit cut me off--and the long entry wasn't recorded--before Box Turtle posted it permanently. One of the minor drawbacks of a reptile using a computer. But maybe some tighter and faster editing will actually work to the reader's benefit; I'll try to do a quick reconstruction of that earlier entry before heading out today for a ten-mile slackpack over Surplus and Balpate Mountains to Grafton Notch. Yesterday was a similar hike: ten miles (but over Moody and Wyman Mtns.) hiking with only a day pack, returning to the Pine Ellis Lodging hostel for the night. Tonight, we will have our packs delivered to us at a road crossing and then will carry them a little further with us on the trail to a campsite. No more hostel stays until I meet Mr. Box Turtle this Wednesday in Gorham, New Hampshire! I wanted to mention a special example of trail magic we experienced awhile back, at the Lean-to (name for shelter along trail in Maine; log three-sided structure surrounded by tentsites, with a privy and near a spring, brook, or pond)at West Carry Pond. Around 6pm there was a commotion as a boat pulled up to the shore of the pond and a group got out. "Goodies! Goodies are here!" Like lemmings, the hikers piled out of tents and the shelter to see what had arrived. Our trail angels had delivered fourteen dozen, giant (hiker-sized) homemade cookies in various flavors (in animal-proof bins) for the enjoyment of us and the hikers to follow, something they do twice week all summer! We also enjoyed some of the leftover shrimp and scallops in garlic sauce that they had enjoyed with cocktails on their boat trip over. In Rangeley, I found a bookstore and finally picked out a poem to learn by a Maine poet. The contemporary poet Philip Booth's poem, "How to See Deer" makes a great bookend to my Georgia poem by James Dickey about a transformational deer-hunting expedition ("Springer Mountain"). I had several days hiking by myself again between Rangeley and Andover and found the poem recitation a welcome addition to my mental health while walking all day. (Since Katahdin, I had hiked with Inchworm, a woman nearly my age, for companionship and safety.) Every day when alone, I repeat the now seven poems I've learned on the trail, from GA, NC, TN, VA, MD, WV and now ME. It takes up some time, provides a kind of rhythm, and also food for thought as I turn the words over in my head while passing through the forest scenery. Orten I add in the few other poems I know too, so I have a group spanning from John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" of 1815 to Philip Booth. Nearly all the poems picked for the trail have strong nature or science themes. For Maryland, I found a sonnet (short! but Maryland is a very small part of the trail)written by a young Edgar Allen Poe (a Baltimorean, "To Science." It's a poet's lament about the unwelcome (to the poet!) explanation and clarity that science provides about the workings of the world. A contrast to that is my West Virginia poem by the contemporary poet Louise McNeil, called "Schroedinger's Waves," which takes its inspiration from a scientific theory about how waves (light, water, electricity) work in nature and affect our perception. "Vaunting Oak" by the Tennessee poet John Crowe Ransom uses an old tree(familiar image on the AT)to, interestingly, suggest the fragility of love. The only one not explicitly set in nature in Willa Cather's (poet from VA; I hadn't realized she lived there or was born there, but there is a connection)poem, "The Tavern." It has lovely flower imagery and is such a powerful love poem I couldn't resist. Box Turtle could use a little more love out here on the trail! I better go--sorry to leave you for breakfast! XX