Date: 2004-04-19
From: Georgia

To: Maine
Miles today: 297.3
Weather: overcast clouds

Hot SpringsMile 297.3Monday 4/19Word for the day: Tortoise, as in I am the tortoise, the last to leaveeach morning but I pass many along the trail.[Note: this entire entry is written without the E, D, or W keys andpainstakingly, er..lovingly reconstructed with the stylus after thefact for your reading pleasure!]Coming outa Hot Springs the sun heats the trail to 80 degrees. I'mcarrying a 45 lb pack. Insanity. But a good kind of insanityconsidering most of the extra weight owes to the kindness of my manycare-package sending friends: boxes from Mary, Linda, Marie & Justinand cards from Kathleen and Pam.. wow! The significance of such signsof love out here in Appalachian Space is immeasurable! Special thanksalso to Indian Gap trail angels Jane, Tom & Pat. Wow!From my new little $40 pocket radio comes the words I wanna say butcannot for the sake of movement, that and this failing keyboard. Skynard (I think) sings of "movin on town to town" and as the strainsof live bluegrass drift upward to the trail from Hot Springs below, Iknow it is so of me, moving on from yet another town, this one awinner, a place I could have stopped and stayed, love it, but left,left just as the weekend festivities were getting under way. Anothersong comes on, the singer sings (an I paraphrase)I get up in the morning once more with the blues, summon the strengthand put on my walkin shoes, I go up on the mountain and what do I see,but the whole world falling down in front of me.Between my all-comfy 3-night stay at The Gentry house of Elmer andclosing Paddlers pub with the legendary Baltimore Jack, (who went outfor a ride and never came back) the latter resulting in sevenconsecutive thru hikes of the AT, and with copious amounts of Bourbon. I was all about Lisa, my Paddler's waitress, and if she wasn't game (Inever asked), I was interested in Caroline @ the local outfitters. Idid manage to ask the latter out for dinner or beers, but she was busythat night. Her request for a rain check went unfulfilled. Hell, I'm athru hiker. It's now or never, every day. I did a face plant the other day that for a moment had me sure my tripwas over. Broken nose, broken glasses, concussion, anything. Muchsmaller things have spelled the "end of the trail" for many. Amazingly, I suffered none of these.   But it was that one look up andaway from the trail at my feet that took me down, the very momentarylapse of attention on the path over which I have expressed so muchconcern. One look up and next thing I know I'm pulling my face up offa blood-splattered rock.   I got lucky. Very lucky. So in drunken solidarity to my ramskull-tough forehead, I took a 2:30a.m. dive off an unusually steep chunk of sidewalk outside the HotSprings Post Office, bloodying up my knees to match head and tearing agood-sized gash in my $50 hi-tech mountaineering pants. These thingsyou gotta do after weeks of Olympic-monk like livin' in da woods.Hot Springs has an old red caboose for a tourist info center. Istopped in there and met Helen, sweet old grandma fulla love for hertown but kinda lacking in just about every brochure I asked for. Sheknew a little about cabooses though, which was nice. Some of the trees along the trail have wounds, folds, places where thetree is pulling back in upon itself, collecting itself. These woundsmake for funny shapes . This one a vagina. This one a church keykeyhole. This one a mouth devouring a "Game Lands" sign nailed theredecades ago, now bent and sinking, literally being sucked into thetree, the tree's way of dealing with such intrusions into its skin. Iwonder if I leaned long enough against a tree if it would enfold me,grow around me, make of me a burl, a bump in its timeless skywardgrowth.A young blonde thru hiker girl named Indie offers me a blow pop. A blowpop. I take it.I stop at a lovely little seep and cup my hands to drink from itsmoss-shrouded spring-in-the-side-of-a-hill mouth. I drink the waterhere unfiltered, almost solely. It is clean. It comes from theground, smells like Heaven. I understand that this will soon no longerbe the case. The further north we walk, the closer civilization willencroach. Then the water will need to be nuked every time.John Denver sings of "goin to Carolina in his mind.. seeing thesunshine, can't you feel the moonshine.." I am in Carolina. Back and forth between North Carolina and Tennessee.A few miles tomorrow and I'll have passed the 300 mile mark. Tiny purple irises, miniatures of the sort so loved by Van Gogh, growlike mad now along the edges of the trail. The Spring air smells ofcinnamon and vanilla. My $300 down REI sleeping bag smells of me,smells like the musk of me. I crawl into it now and am comforted. Notent tonight. Zippo, Bic an I opt not to pitch our tents. The starsare out in full bloom. Let's hope they stay that way, and rain cloudsstay far a field.. for tonight anyway. -RSMAs I pass the 300 mile mark on this journey I begin (again?) to ask alot the question "Why?" Why am I doing this? Of all the things Icould be doing: sailing, jumping out of airplanes, learning thesaxophone, courting Ukrainian beauties, learning Italian, why this? Theanswer comes easy: because I can. And because I want to. For all thepeople out there without legs to walk or eyes to see, for all friendsand strangers and trail angels with envious longing in their eyes thatthey too might buy the time or find the strength of will to do itthemselves, I do it for you. And I do it for the dead. Then a pineneedle stylus hits the stone slab LP and from the horn of some wildflowering plant with gramophone petals comes the earnest voice ofBowie singing "It's the terror of knowing what this world's all about,and watching some good friend screaming `Let me out!'" and I know I'mwalking as much for Luciano as for me. Four suicides last year aloneamongst people I know. And cruelly perhaps but not without just causeI say, "Fuck AIDS! Screw cancer & all the other terminal illnessesthat make loved ones look up and care!" What about the lonesomedisease of the shotgun and the noose, the overdose and the warm tubblood sluice? An how reassuring is it to muster the courage to call911 when you're feeling in danger of taking your life, only to have thecops show up, guns drawn, pointed at you? Pointed at YOU! Ahh, thehell with it. I digress and the day ambles on and the bugs buzz aroundmy ears and everything, everything in these woods is better than THAT! Better than a shotgun bathroom goodbye and all the zillion reasons whyto pull that trigger. I walk this walk for you my too-soon departedfriends. Ironically, this stretch of the trail is peppered withgravestones. Little Millard Haire's tiny12-yr old skeleton sleepssweetly by trail, at rest here since 1863. -RSM[Postscript: By day's end I calculate that I have ascended a total of2,400 feet, not counting the downhill¢s. And this has been an averageday. I am the walking dead as I stumble into camp at sundown. Onlythe insects gather round to greet me. My God! What am I doing outhere?]For the full story of Rick's journey, visit Jigglebox.com