Date: 2004-10-02
To: Katahdin
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: overcast clouds

October 2, 2004Forty degree at dawn. Makes it hard to get outa bed. Winter again, or damnnear. Yazzy sips coffee I made when I got up, rousted by Nature¢s Call aroundsix a.m. I can¢t stand to be watch while writing, but she swears her eyes areclosed.The sound of water on rocks was not so loud last night, but again we arecreek side. Knocked down sixteen miles yesterday, about 13 of them ¢real¢ ATmiles and three of them magical, logical map-savvy miles, cutting down loggingroads, ¢folding time and space¢ as I like to call it, achieving in a shortstroke what AT engineers obviously couldn¢t put together for reasons ofproperty rights, easements, whatever. Result: Shazzam! Yazzy and I hike outand reappear on the AT just shy of the next river ford and just ahead ofMighty Joy and Apple Cheeks, a young couple from Oakland, CA who were two miles ahead of us as of yesterday morning. Ha. Ha. Or as the kids say,¢Nanana-nanana!¢I love that shit.In my next life, I hope, well.. if I don¢t get to be an angel with bull mooserack-sized wings who smells like cookies and attracts women in mad hoards, oran eagle who soars, I hope I get to sit on some high command at FATE Centraland manipulate Time & Space. The record will show that I¢ve done a damn goodjob of it Down Here.So we¢re on the south side of a wide river and we gotta ford it because Mainehasn¢t invented ¢the bridge¢ yet, and we both dreamt of moose walking aroundthe tent last night which likely means they really were. Our water isn¢tfreezing yet, so I haven¢t come full circle from the days of my First 100Miles, and there¢s a little whiskey left and Yazzy¢s breasts are still warm atnight as Apple pies in a Mayberry kitchen window (and of equal circumference),so we may just make it to Katahdin ALIVE. Sorry Jon Krakauer. Nothing towrite about here.Six and a half months. I¢m hard pressed to remember the last time I did ANYTHING for six months straight. Even school came in shorter semesters. What a freak of Life, what a monster undertaking,, what joy and pain and beauty and strain. What EVER will I do next? What ever could top.. this?1:14 pm Gulf Hagas MountainThe wind is up. It spooks me. It¢s not a companion I want as I head into thenext ascent. Three more ascents before we get to go down, the five miles ofthat to make the day a sixteen.Yazzy is in fine spirits now. My grim, reflective mood bothers her. She seemsto have forgotten that just hours ago she was crying in her oatmeal about herdead camera battery and other camel-back-breaking-straw annoyances.We eat our lunch of bread and salami and cheese and bird-food and I just look at her and say, ¢I¢m fine. I¢m just done. I want this to be done. This is anendurance test at this point, that¢s all. Our moods rise and fall with themountains. Be patient. Let¢s hike.¢ Now it¢s not feet, not like it was in Jersey with twenty-mile daze. No, now itis calves burning, the back of my legs afire all the time, with every step, eachpeak ascent like a 1000 deep-knee bends. Insanity. Maine, you are killing me.but Metallica helps. And Tool. And...The trail now deep in autumn leaves, obscuring roots and rocks. The futurehaunts me. I am neurotic without reason.Puccini writes a geographically confused opera about two lovers dying in a hotdesert outside New Orleans. Today, while topping White Cap Mountain, literallythe LAST peak before Katahdin, I am exalted, yet the opera ringstrue. I, like Puccini in Europe with his imaginary ideas about an America he has never seen, I am geographically confused. I have surmounted some 150mountains in the East yet have real idea where I am. I walk a green tunnel of hastily gobbled-up government soil full of bones andblood and hunted men and haunting beauty, a far-from-virgin forest cleared andcleared and cleared again only to grow irreverent over every flickering human endeavor, a field cleared for crops a lifetime ago now supplanted by lush jungle growth, again the forest wins, and comes now FREE to ME, free and phantasmagoric, rife with dreams and inspired thoughts and all the makings of anything the mind can muster, like a Hollywood blue screen upon which anything can be made to live alongside anything else, Cajuns in the desert and bayous thorny with cactus and housecats and crows over wheat fields eternal. I walk a green tunnel.Now with Katahdin in plain view across a valley of lakes and lowland woods, Idon¢t know where my lovers are, in desert or swamp, and the woman I am withtakes off her underwear and hikes with a smile, ever the more aroused as thewind picks up in late afternoon and stimulates her, her.. interest. I am afraid of the wind, cold wind that is, cold wind atop high places. It is arecently acquired phobia, don¢t asks me why, how or where from. But the jokes a good one. The joke is on me.My young companion, unruffled by the wind and, in fact, every bit tickled by it,suddenly wants to get down and dirty right here and now on top of this mountain. Holy Jeezuz! I¢m all for spontaneity and wild, animal-like sex in the woods, but this is neither the time nor place. All I can think about is how to get down off this fucking mountain STAT, down into the safety of the trees. It is a strange juxtaposition, my fear and her arousal at, and or ¢of¢ the same thing. The wind. Wicked clit-licking wind. Yazzy mentions having been sick somewhere near Waynesboro. I think for a moment and realize that I have never, not once on this entire journey, been ill. Perhaps it¢s because I stayed out of the wind.-RSM