Date: 2011-06-29
From: Inn on the Hudson, Peekskill NY

To: Clarence Fahnestock State Park
Miles today: 17.2

(In which I contemplate women and writing)When I excuse myself from the hotel room to write my journal entry, Craig asks me to read him a sample, so I read aloud the list of hikers' discussion topics before I go outside to write. In the morning Capt. Planet tells me that they discussed my list and decided it was almost right, but that girls should be number one, and I feel slightly cheated for having apparently not been involved in the even more frequent talk of girls that they have.We bid farewell to the Craig and Henrick, and learn that Timber has decided to fly back to Germany as well. He thinks that he will fly back in a few weeks to finish the trail, but in private Craig and Henrick shake their heads. "If he flies back to Germany he will not come back this year," Craig predicts, and I have to admit that Timber's odds of finishing his thru-hike seem long, though I wish him the best.Capt. Planet and I spend more than an hour trying to hitch a ride, before finally accepting that hitching in such a metropolitan area of New York is nearly impossible. We search for public transportation options, and when we discover that there are none we bite the bullet and pay the twenty-two dollars for a cab. It's the first time that I've completely failed at getting a hitch, and it makes me miss the south.When we finally get back to the trail at 10am Capt. Planet and I hike together for a bit, and to help bring my conversation pie graph into line we spend nearly the whole time talking about girls. We've moved from our past relationships on to our favorite actresses when Capt. Planet's phone, which he had forgotten to turn off, rings. "Hi pops. I'm good. We stayed at the hotel last night. It was fine. Hey, can you give me a list of hot actresses? Actresses, like in movies. Right. Because we're two guys in the woods and we need more women to talk about. Do you know how old Julia Roberts is these days? I know you're thirty years older than me. Hey! Eww don't talk about my mother that way!"I let Capt. Planet hike ahead while I stop for a bathroom break, and while I hike alone I contemplate male hikers' obsession with women. It's not, I think, an objectification of women, at least not specifically. It's closer to the idea of women as unobtainable fantasy (at least temporarily), in which the imagined women are necessarily abstract and removed from the concrete and psychological specifics of the real world. And if the fantasies that guys talk about on the trail dwell on the physical aspects of women, the interactions they actually seek are the ones involving the attention of women, flirtatious if possible, but rarely more than that. What is desired as much as anything, I think, is the affirmation that comes from seeing oneself as attractive and desirable in a woman's eyes, as worthy of seeking out and spending time with. Women not as objects but as judges and reflections of ourself, with whom we can finally, fully become men.I dwell on this as I write in part because I think that, at this point in our journeys, it is the scarcity of women that separates us (by which I mean the vast majority of thru-hikers who are male) psychologically from the rest of society, more than the scarcity of food, more than the immersion in nature, more than the smell. Like soldiers far away from home, it is the thought of women back home, real or imagined, current or former, that makes us feel so far away. For their part, I think that women hikers' experience is strongly affected by being surrounded by men starved for the company and affection of women, and while the result is not always positive (for women or men), I think that it is an unavoidable result of severely skewed gender ratios in isolated environments (see: Alaska).* * *I meet up with Capt. Planet at a road crossing and we walk a mile off trail down the road to camp at a state park. The park lets thru-hikers camp for free, and we get our pick of flat, soft and spongy tent spots. In the park I meet Gas Cap for the first time. He is in the middle of a flip-flop hike, having hiked portions of the southern half already, hopped to Harpers Ferry to hike north, and will then travel back south to fill in his mission sections. He started hiking all the way back in January, and tells stories of hiking in Tennessee through the snow and the cold. I sit with him for a hour, talking and hearing his stories.I would like to talk more, but excuse myself so that I can write in my journal and still go to sleep before it is much past midnight. Writing, like any form of observation, affects and changes the experience it is observing. (I could try to write days or weeks later, but this would greatly change the content of the observations, and even the act of careful remembering and mental note taking would affect the experience.) It is a fundamental tradeoff, and while I am glad to write (and think that I will be even gladder for it later), I also look forward to the day when I will stop, at least for a while, and simply experience life.