Date: 2011-05-05
From: Jenkins Shelter

To: 5.7 miles before Wapiti Shelter
Miles today: 32.3
Weather: clear sky

(In which I break my second trekking pole and experiment with walking sticks)The night is cold, and I bundle up in all of my clothes and in my 32-degree sleeping bag cinched down so that only my nose pokes out. Even still I am just warm enough to sleep, drifting between dreams and a state of semi-consciousness. It is, at least, good motivation to get up early and get moving, and I skip breakfast for the first time so that I can start hiking at sunrise and get warmed up.Hiking, eventually, does the trick, and in what seems like little time I have hiked 4 miles and am warm enough to stop for breakfast. I stop at a picnic table next to a tent where a hiker is packing up. His name is Fifteen, he says, and The Rambler is still in the tent. They're southbounders -- two of the very few on this part of the trail right now -- and are each finishing up a small section to complete a southbound hike they started last year. I ask if he met Inferno, and while the name doesn't ring a bell for him, The Rambler calls out from the tent that she recognizes the name from the registers. She comes out and introduces herself, and I learn that they met on the trail last year and are engaged to be married this July. I ask if they've seen the movie Southbounders, about a couple who meet hiking southbound on the AT, but they have not.They both carry tiny daypacks, and The Rambler tells me how she started the trail weighing 100 pounds and carrying a 60 pound pack, and when she met Fifteen she got him to show her the secret of his lightweight ways. When I've finished breakfast and we've started hiking our opposite ways, some of their excitement at being so close to finishing has rubbed off on me. I can imagine what it would be like to return to the trail filled with energy and anticipation at finally writing the last chapter in a long journey, and to start a new life together. For the first time I start to think of what it would be like at the summit of Katahdin, but soon I remember how very many hundreds of miles I have to go and I put such far-future daydreams out of my head.* * *Hiking in the afternoon, my foot trips on a root, catches my trekking pole and snaps it like the first one. I don't even bother to stop hiking, I just collapse the pole as I keep walking and stick it in my pack's side pocket next to its crippled twin. Waking with no poles takes more getting used to than walking with one pole did, and my hands and arms don't know what to do with themselves. My posture changes -- I stoop when I walk up hill -- and this reminds me of Oompa, who was the first fast, poleless thru-hiker I met.After hiking poleless for a while, it occurs to me that I can always use a hiking stick. I pick up a long, straight stick from the ground and break it off to the appropriate height. The excess pieces break off easily in my hand, so I have little faith in this stick's longevity, but when I start walking with it it actually works surprisingly well. The stick is green enough to be springy instead of brittle, and though it flexes more under my weight than the trekking poles did, even when I stumble and put more weight on it, it doesn't break.I look for a second stick to match it, and soon realize just how lucky I was with the first stick. I watch the ground for an hour as I hike, but every stick is either too dry and brittle or not long and straight enough. I see one tree, perfectly straight and branchless, sticking straight up on the side of the trail, and I pause in front of it, but I can see a few leaves at the very top. I can't bring myself to kill the still living tree, so I continue my search among the already fallen branches on the ground.I find a few temporary sticks, but though thicker than the original, they don't last as long, eventually snapping when I put too much pressure on them. The sticks help me make good time while I have them however, and with an easy trail grade and the distraction of the stick search, the miles fly by. I stop for a long, late lunch where I had planned on stopping for the day, but the sky is cloudless and I feel good so I keep on hiking. Tomorrow I will reach the Wood's Hole hostel, and every mile I hike tonight is one less I have to hike before I get there tomorrow.Having not washed my clothes or fully charged my Kindle since Kincora, nearly two hundred miles ago, I'm eagerly looking forward to the comforts of civilization, and go to sleep imagining what it would be like to have socks that didn't reek.