Date: 2004-08-10
From: Georgia

To: Maine
Miles today: 20.0
Weather: overcast clouds

Somewhere in southern VTAugust 10? 2004 Strong smell of Christmas along much of the trail yesterday, today inalpine regions, the highest of the Appalachian highs three and fourthousand feet in Mass, VT. Right now the smell of cool new rain-washed air and all these trees andall of this floor-level plant life just happy exhaling oxygen ingratitude for rain sweet rain. And I in a position to appreciate the rain because I myself am dryerbeneath my sil-nylon tarp slung so low to the ground that I'm nose totarp here on my back in the dark. Almost. I, too, have room tobreathe. Distant lightning so faint , faint as the flicker of nowdistant fireflies. Where have the fireflies gone? Would that I have knownI'd be bidding them farewell back in..? how far back was it? Pennsylvania? Jersey?   I miss them. In New England they've been replaced by mad mushrooms red and orangeand purple popping up everywhere in that graveyard dig smell of earth,earth, earth. Ha! To equate the beauty scent of loam with death, allof our death's, is it wrong? Speaking of death, up on Greylock Greystoke gray and cold in theclouds when I walked over it anyway, young urban professionals strollabout Nature's Learning Center there in the old lodge, the yups cladin the newest and the finest REI has to offer, Golite bags for the dayhikers, Patagonia jackets and fleece by Marmot , they stroll thegrounds and outside read the words of Henry David carved poorly in thewrong kind of rock such that the words are chipping away. Thoreau. Ofall the words, the bad-ass tough love to humanity and real love of theEarth words he wrote, of all his tight Harvard-taught expressions ofgrief over the stupidity of man and the crystalline constancy ofnature, clear as Walden ice, the yups read from the rock a bland andhalf hearted description of the view from their damn punyMassachusetts mountain. I'm sorry. But I think H.D. would agree. And MA native Kerouac too. I read it and shook my head. God helpmankind if all he ever chooses to commemorate are the blandest of thebland expressions of great minds. But I digress. Tonight it is the song of rocks and water wrestling in the brook below.It is the plap plap plap of raindrops dropped twenty minutes ago fromsky, now reaching my tarp from high above in leafy canopy. It is thecomfort of a hundred years of leafy dead matter making cushy my bed andhalf a dozen small trees and leafy plants here beneath my tarp with melike the living room of a plant freak but all just because there are sodamn many of them that I could barely find a clear place to throw downmy ground cloth poncho and make this night's home. Home away fromhome. Going on five months now of life inside this tunnel of greens and grayof stone and white and shades of brown forever. Sometimes blue of skyseen through tree tops but mostly not as eyes like laser pointers scanthe trail ahead for footing, obstruction, bugs, animals, mud, rock,root, you name it. And coming out the tunnel momentarily atpowerline easements or long gravel surfaced roads that start and endnowhere in the wood, or so it seems, coming out into these places tofluttering eyelids and waning pupils as eyes adjust to so much light at once. A flood. And here in Vermont a new trick:beaver flooded sections of trail sometimes deep enough you gotta wadethrough. Beaver damns everywhere and mud, mud, mud. Now I just wanna see one of the critters in action. And so today on a dare and a bet for ten pints of good Vermont beer Isummoned the fearless spirit of my youth, stripped down to shorts andclambered in to beaver swamp pond, swam a short distance and climbedatop a beaver mound for the amusement and photo snapping fun of fellowthruhikers Mousebait, Keytone, White Patch, who were beside themselvesthat I would actually do it. Why not? Three a.m. tired and now hunger returns as body, awake at this unrulyhour, thinks it time to eat again. Woken by the storm now passed, Ithought I'd write a bit. Five months of bug bites itching, of spiderscrawling though none tonight I'm happy to report. Five months of goingdays unshowered, of lousy Lipton dinners that queerly taste of Heavenafter long days hiked, of blisters and split toes, sore pads of feet,tweaked knees and ankles and of ever more obvious and growing andsculpted muscles of upper and lower leg, carved from wood, carved frommarble. Amazing. With but five hundred miles or so to go to Katahdin, I wonder: whatnext? -RSM