Date: 2005-03-14
From: Springer Mountain Shelter

To: Hawk Mountain Shelter, GA
Miles today: 7.4
Weather: broken clouds

Day Two: In which our heroine sleeps outside in a lightning storm (and her mother and I both ask: "Is she crazy?"), a boy shows Jess how to pitch a tent, tent stakes are the currency of the trail, Jess uses the word "brook" as a verb (good word), Jess meets a nice Jewish boy ("In the wilderness he is wandering? His poor mother!"), and someone is carrying a guitar through the mountains: The storm last night was not to be believed: wind gusting through my tent, lightning flashing so bright and near that my tent might as well have had electrical wiring, rain sheeting down, and the ominous omnipresent rumble of thunder. Welcome to the trail.I slept fitfully - small wonder, as the tent walls ballooned in and out around me - and stretched my headband out to cover my ears and face both. It helped. I stayed essentially dry, thank God, - thanks entirely, I am sure, to Cuppa Joe, who showed me a few tricks yesterday for pitching the tent to stay rain-free. 'Bless that man,' I thought, and tightened the drawstring of my sleeping bag over my head, while the tent shook.'I hope you don't mind my showing you this stuff,' he'd said, wedging handfuls of dry grass underneath the outside edges of the tent seams, to keep water from running into the tent through the netting sides. "I don't want to seem like some know-it-all telling you what to do." "Are you kidding?" I said.Scholar gave me extra tent stakes to pull out the sides of my tent. "Here," she said. "My brother gave me four extra." "Thanks," I said."Are you sure? You can have them back at Neel's Gap." "If you give them back to me at Neel's Gap," she said, "they're going in the hiker box," and held the stakes out with a look that brooked no opposition.After the night's deluge, the morning dawned clear and sunny. I ate oatmeal for breakfast, though only half the amount I'd allotted myself. I don't know what I was thinking. I put enough oatmeal in those baggies to feed a small elephant.The four of us- Mike, Scholar, Cuppa Joe, and I - left the shelter somewhere around nine. We waited a bit for Mike to get his pack together. "Two more minutes," he kept saying. "Longest minute of my life," I said. "Mike, we're realizing what you're trailname's gonna have to be," said Cuppa Joe. "One more minute," said Mike. "That's it," I said. "Nuh-uh," he said. "No way."Turtle, Shpilkes, and I Can - the three self-proclaimed "old guys" who'd also stayed at Springer that night - left early and must have pushed on ahead; we didn't see them the rest of the day.We headed down out of Springer and into Big Stamp Gap and before we'd gone a mile we'd walked from sunshine into mist. Ten minutes after that we met our first SOBOs of the season, a scant two miles from finishing their journey. Evy (?) started in August of last year (though he took a month off for the worst parts of winter) and had never even intended to hike the trail - he just went for a walk one day, he said, and kept on going. "It is a very good adventure," he said. (He wasn't American. We couldn't quite place his accent, though I guessed Israeli.) "You will be pain. You will be very pain. But it is a very good adventure."Later, stopped at Long Creek Falls for a snack and a rest, I said meditatively, "It was kind of surreal, wasn't it? We leave this sunny mountaintop and descend into the fog and ten minutes later this apparition comes out of the mist saying, 'You will be pain.'"Cuppa Joe snorted. "You have to tell it like that," he said. "On Trail Journals. Tell it that way. I think you can pull it off."We reached Hawk Mountain Shelter early - by 1:30 or 2 in the afternoon, just as Just Playin' Jane was about to leave. We all felt we could have gone a bit farther, but the next shelter's not for another seven miles, and really, this early in the game, why push it? I've got some sore muscles, a couple of taped blisters, and a toenail that looks as though it's thinking of falling off, but that's all par the course. I ate beans for dinner; later James and Amanda from Trail Journals showed up, as did Geronimo, Bramble, Sunset Screamer, Weatherman, a few other thrus, and four spring breakers from Biloxi. It's grown dark now, and I'm lying in my tent, bundled up inside my sleeping bag, watching my breath frost in the air. Someone is playing a guitar in the distance. As I told Cuppa Joe, I got nowhere to be but here.