Date: 2003-04-25
From: Mount Collins Shelter

To: Gatlinburg
Miles today: 4.5
Weather: light rain

here in gatlinburg, a tourist town in the mountains -- think theme park vegas crossed with aspen...southern but upscale but very tacky. with laffy taffy, odwalla, happy feet, cinderella, famous shoes, dutch, and woodsdragon. here too are no doubt and mcguyver, and the slackson 5. getting drunk at a brew pub listening to LIVE MUSIC! bring it on! missing my family and friends, missing the freedom and purity of the appalachians. loving the crazy laughing caring surrogate family i have out here. fixing my knees & resupplying for tomorrow. no zero here -- on to Hot Springs where massages are only $30 bucks, with the happy ending. life is beautiful and sad right now. maybe that is just me, since that is what much of my experience feels like in life: beautiful and sad.the past month has really affected my sense of smell. when i reached the viewing tower on clingman's dome, the highest point on the AT and in the great smoky mountains, there were throngs of tourists spiraling up the ramp to the top of the tower. sorry...i got distracted writing this in a bar, surrounded by music, full of beer. i really miss Ani Difranco, oddly enough. i keep waiting for this guy to play one of her songs, but he never will. sigh. anyway...these people who don't carry their lives on their backs have INTENSE smells wafting off them, fragrances which deeply affect me, like that first taste of food when you've just gotten into town, the taste that reaches down to your toes through your groin. that taste is the smells around me. "Mmmm, you smell good" I grunt to a passing tourist, who recoils in horror at the sight of a very dirty, funky, hunchbacked, sunburned backpacker reeking of days of hard won mountains in his one pair of clothes with a genuinely crazed look in his eyes. he's not playing by your rules, not living anywhere you recognize, but what he says is penetratingly simply terrifyingly true. you do smell good! i can smeel the lotion, deodorant, perfume, cologne, shampoo, detergent and everything else you use. from the simple smells of pine and sweat, these odors overwhelm and entrance me. am i powerless against them, though mountains fall before me? i crave the women who pass in short shorts and tight cotton shirts, emblazened with the word "Australia", clothes which have no place in the frozen winds of the Smokies. They are hurrying back to their 4-wheeled, climate-controlled, metal dragons after only a minute at the top of the Appalachian Trail, a place i've fought for 24 days to reach. Meanwhile I'm fleeing the summit back to the moss and pine, far from the madness, the intensity, the conflict, the fear that i smell on them. but i miss the music, the beer, and the flesh.there are beautiful women in tight clothes gyrating in their bellybuttons in front of me, but my spirit quest ca go so much deeper, deeper into myself, into the pain fear loneliness and desire which roil under my skin. i contemplate solitude, silence, and celibacy as ways toward my inner experience. no, as ways of exposing my inner self to trees, clouds, rocks, mud, sun, wind, rain, cold, and flowers. let me burn out my inner soul so a deeper maturity might sprout from the ashes. can i do that? or am i simply an april fool, dreaming of flying but held forever to the ground? perhaps i just wish for t he love of a beautiful woman. i do, but also for so much more. give it all to me. i'll climb mountains if i can only find the path.