Date: 2004-09-17
From: Woodstock Inn,North Woodstock, NH

To: Greenleaf Hut
Miles today: 6.4

We ended up zeroing yesterday. We are wimps. There was absolutely no reason for it other than laziness. The breakfast at the inn was the most unbelievable thing. It included coffee, juice, toast, home fries, and sweet rolls, as well as one of anything on the menu. We had joked about getting steak for breakfast, and they actually had a ton of steak on the menu. And seafood. I was modest and ordered an omelet, but County went all out and ordered the "Surf and Turf," eggs scrambled with lobster and a ten ounce steak. It was incredible. I wished I had been braver in my ordering. He said it was the best breakfast he'd ever had. Then we went to the post office for my sleeping bag and discovered that I also had a mail drop. I didn't expect to have a mail drop sent here--now we basically have two full mail drops of food. I suppose it's nice to have a buffer going through the Whites. But our packs will be much heavier. Part of our lack of motivation, maybe, for getting out of town. We ended up meeting this guy, Gluttonous Monk, who is doing a flip-flop. We started hanging out with him, and he offered to let us sleep in his hotel room again that night. So we stayed, ate dinner, and talked. He was a really cool guy, had spent time all over. He was heading from the trail to go work at a wilderness camp on the west coast. So that was a good experience, despite too much TV watching again that night. We finally got out of town this morning, got an easy hitch, and headed up the mountain. We weren't intending to stay at the Hut, but when we got there Goofy and Terrapin were there, moving on, so we had the first two thru-hiker slots and decided to stay. There was work-for-stay available, so we hung out and waited for the Hut Master to show up. She instructed us to wash the walls in one of the bunk rooms. It was the weirdest experience. For one thing, the walls were perfectly clean. For another, she didn't tell us how much work we were supposed to do, so we had no idea how much we were supposed to do or when we were supposed to stop. Another thru-hiker showed up as we were working, a southbounder. Her name was Mystery and she had started in August after her best friend died and her house burned down. If you're going to hike the trail, I suppose those are good reasons. She's also nineteen and is hiking the trail alone. So we worked on the walls--very diligently, I might add--not that we had anything to show for our labor--for two hours, the amount of time the Hut Master had told us was required for work-for-stay. She hadn't checked on us in all that time and we didn't really know the ropes, so we sat in the bunk room and waited to be told what to do. We had finished more than half of the room, more than she had acted like we had to do, but when she finally came back in, after all the paying guests were eating, she acted dismayed that that was all we had done. I don't know if we were supposed to do more than two hours of work, or not "scrub as if our lives depended on it," as she had told us to do. It was bewildering. The evening degenerated from there. We were sequestered in the side room, listening to everyone else eat, starving. I felt like a member of the underclass, or a class below the underclass, the "Croo." The Croo set up this extremely odd dynamic with a three-level class structure--the paying guests, the Croo, then us. When we were finally allowed to eat, we had the leftovers from the guests, and the Croo didn't let us eat with them in the kitchen , but sent us out to huddle in the corner among the guests. They were confused too, asking us why we didn't get to eat until later and why we had to work. The whole situation was about the most awkward social encounter I've ever had in my life. The Croo didn't offer to make us feel comfortable at all. Nothing was offered. They didn't even tell us where to sleep. There was cake on the table that was taken out from under us and put into the paying box. I don't know what I expected, but it wasn't to be treated like less than a human being. I kept offering to help the Croo clean up, or trying to socialize with them, and they would turn me down and not even meet my eyes. The guests didn't even know who we were, since we hadn't been explained or introduced. We were just these stinky, starving bums shoved off in the corner. We finally asked if we could sleep in the bunk room we had cleaned, and they allowed us to, after consulting with each other. I hope it's just this hut that's like this, because it was awful. Maybe they didn't think we did enough work? I don't know. But right now I feel subhuman.