Date: 2004-10-11
From: Katahdin

To: Hotel California
Miles today: 0.0

October 11, 04It¢s over. It¢s all over. Even those hundred or so miles I missed, sprinkled here and there, a 10-mile hitch whilst hungover, fifty miles to chase the girl, they¢re done. I¢ll never make them up. It¢s not in my nature. I don¢t look back. Or if I do, I don¢t GO back. So the AT is completed, hiked, finito. And for the life of me, I couldn¢t at this moment tell you why I did it, why I hiked through 14 states over 2000 miles and half a million vertical feet. Why? Beats me. It¢s Monday in America and people with purposeful lives are nose-to-it. Even though it is Columbus Day, a holiday based on a fiction, one day in a few dozen thousand day of lies. If I sound a bit cynical, perhaps it is the book I¢m reading as I sit here fireside at Yazzy¢s primitive camp by a lake in New Hampshire, a stone¢s throw from the Canadian border. ¢Survivor,¢ the book is called. It¢s a sick and twisted sister-story to Fight Club, Chuck¢s opus. I read a line that makes me think of the AT, and for a moment, a flicker of the ¢why¢ crosses my mileage-stricken brain. ¢The whole year before baptism,¢ he says, ¢every tree, every friend, every thing you saw had the halo around it of your knowing you¢d never see it again.¢ Walking the AT had this quality, afforded one a glimpse into the ¢halo¢ heavenly magic of everything, a magic we don¢t normally get to see. Every tree or rock or chipmunk or stream or pond or beaver lodge or human shelter I encountered, I knew I would likely never see it again. Later in the book, author Palahnuik repeats the same idea, sort-of: ¢Imagine you live in a house, only every day your house is in a different town.¢ This would certainly apply to all the dozens and dozens of hostels and motels and guest bedrooms I slept in on off-trail days of rest. The trail towns, however, these I could maybe see again someday, and the hostels, especially toward the end up here in New England. Freshest in my mind, they were always a bum-rush, in and out, obscene check-out times like 8 a.m.(Heavens!!) In the eyes of this drunkard athlete-poet, there were no halos `oer the heads of these innkeepers.October 12, 04Lake Francis w/YazzyNo, whatever auras existed owing to the absolutely transitory nature of the journey belonged to the trees, to God¢s four-legged creatures, to the lichen-encrusted stones, to the curve of the trail through a field, to the dance of an enchanted doe outside an ancient stone shelter in the Smokys. The halos were on the forest itself. The ability to see them was earned in the walking, just so. Walk and walk and walk in the woods until the woods become your reality, and the outside world becomes estranged. Mind you, however, said vision comes at a price. And here I sit in the very northern woods of NH preparing myself, mentally, to pay that price. Going back into The World.. I¢m frightened. I didn¢t ¢fit in¢ real well before, and I dunno how I¢m gonna swing it now. I¢ve got a head fulla halos! I look out and I see cobalt blue of pending winter lake of ice, its far shore a fall bouquet of multi-colored halo¢d trees, leaves of New England Autumn all aglow now as the Western Sun, hidden from me here in Yazzy¢s lakeside cabin, pours its heartfelt warmth and glory forth and at it, at the forest across the water. It is magic hour 6 p.m., a wood fire burning in the stove and Yaz asleep beside me here on old and tattered couch of camphouse character. And there¢s NOTHING to do here. Nothing. That¢s why we came! After a man walks 2000 miles and all the business and stresses that that entails, man needs to park his ass far away from the Things of The World and do NOTHING. Do nothing but reflect.I get up from the couch, go outside and down to the water¢s edge to witness more closely the miracle of sunset. But I am bored quickly, as though one could overdose on beauty and nature until it reach the point of ennui. In two days, I plan to board Southwest Flight 922 out of Manchester, to bid adieu this East Coast reality, this ¢place¢ I¢ve been immersed in for over half a year. Yazzy, the cabins on lakes (hers, my fathers), Justin, Aunt Mary, the AT, autumn color, ever-colder nights, the damn one same rock radio station I¢ve been stuck listening to through all of Maine and the Whites. I¢m leaving it, but I don¢t know what for. I have forgotten. Does the Shire still exist, Sam? Quaint and incestuous little Idyllwild nudged up in the soCal mountains, my home though I have no dwelling there, per se. I have a car there. No, worse. I have two cars. Or one functional car and one monument to my insanity, very big and in everyone¢s curious face and going nowhere. Can I go back? Is it healthy? Can one walk two thousand miles, apparently fully FIVE MILLION paces, only to end back at a place of going nowhere again? And something else¢¦I never met the girl of my dreams, or rather, the woman I saw in a dream hiking the Appalachian Trail, the woman who would find me. No woman. No bear. No moose. Notice how I say ¢no woman¢ and not ¢no women.¢ Elly. Ahh Hell, let¢s call a spade a spade ¢ Pele was here name. Pele Firestarter. Good trail name, though it was in fact her commune name before that. Pele came into my AT experience early, kind of a cruel joke from those manipulative swine in the Greek rendition of Heaven. They sent me a hottie with a Melissa Moore lion¢s mane of hair on Day Two, and she went Postal on me after one week. BOOM! Nutso. It took a bit to shake her (empathetic as I was to her madness but in no way capable of walking with it), but soon she was gone. Then came Pegasus, with a HUGE space in between. I had the pleasure of about 48 hours with Pegasus before my pre-arranged trail vacation to New Hampshire for the 4th of July cut that short. When months later I caught Pegasus again Vermont, whatever we¢d had in PA seemed destined to go further. In an odd sequence of events, however, she returned to the trail almost immediately, whilst I, completely unplanned, wound up staying in Manchester, Vermont for well over a week, losing Pegasus altogether. Finally, a month before The End, I met Yazzy. There was a spark, I let her go, I chased her, we summited together, and I¢m with her now. But the spark is still just that: a spark. No sense at all that this is the woman I was meant to lasso across the prairie home to Hotel California with me to spend Forever with in Wherever I end up calling home. No sense that this is The One. (And all due credit to Yaz: who would want ME? Mr. Wherever, Whatever, Whenever)So I did find womEN. But dammit I never did see a bear in the wilds of Appalachia!! I never did see a moose in Maine!! And I feel cheated as Hell about it, lemme tell ya! Ahh, fuckit. In the words of Tom Waits, ¢There¢s nothing wrong with her (me) that a hundred dollars won¢t fix.¢-RSM