Date: 2004-03-19
To: Springer Mountain, GA
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: clear sky

Train to Georgia, Day Three:First ContactMet Doug, don't yet know his trail name. he picked me out of a crowd boarding the train, this my last of three consecutive trains since leaving California Tuesday. Today is Friday. Yah. Do the math. Anyway, so Doug sights my pack and introduces himself. I¢m awed and almost a little intimidated to find that not only is he an intended thruhiker like me, but this will be his second time! Jesus. Now that's Gonzo dedication. Back in Charlottesville I dined out with Irena, a sweet grandmotherly woman from Canada who'd been across the aisle from me on the previous train. Both facing a four or five hour layover, we checked our bags at the station and set out together for a stroll down the towns restaurant row, as it were.. I let Grandma Irena pick the place and well she did choose. Place turned out to be a brewery. Naturally I had to sample all their brews, each a six ounce or so glass but by the end of the taste test I was amply baked. Irena told me of her seven children, all well and alive, even her one bugger of a son, as she called him, the forty year old, my age roughly, the bad seed. Irena reminded me of my idealized visions of both my grandmothers combined, sweet, happy-go-lucky, adventurous, and full of stories and enthusiasm for my stated journey. Ours was one of those fast friendships of convenience and trust that rarely occur in the "real" world. Such things only happen in "movies," that is to say "moving life" or life on the road, the rails and who knows maybe soon the trail. Back on the train I offered to buddy up with her on a seat so she wouldn't have to be seated with a stranger. Having discovered once under way that other seats were free, I relinquished my seat to her that she may stretch out and get some rest. And no doubt I should be doing the same. Myself now in a two-seater, I could lie down but that my recent conversation with Doug has me all excited , thinking about the trail. Or maybe it was the two cups of coffee I drank sipping under the spell of Jamaica the bartender at some cute little bistro across from the train station. Jamaica. Gorgeous, sultry, wants to write freelance, be a photographer too. I should have been all over that, full of advice or at least inroads to conversation with this Virginia goddess, but no, I was too busy stumbling, nay, stopping my sure-to-stumble tongue before it could say anything. She no doubt found me rather odd and boring. But maybe not. I just don't know anymore. It's been too long and I haven't the faintest idea how women see me. Well, with the exception of Rebecca and Alex yesterday. But surely that was some freak anomaly! Surely those girls were drunk and their comments about my cute ass were said out of pity for my blatant humpback personality, all warped and freakish and sure to live out its life knocking around bell towers and the laboratories of mad scientists!! Okay. I'm getting weird. It's late and I've been on trains for too damn long. This rail gig is savage and unnatural and I wouldn't recommend it to the Butcher of Lyon. Amtrak is degenerating. The curtness of its conductors is on par with every schweinhund greyhound bus driver I've ever met. Bitch, bitch, bitch. Ah, there's nothing wrong with me a First Class upgrade wouldn't fix. Tomorrow morning Springer Mountain. The beginning. And the end of trains, for awhile anyway. -RSM So much for sleep. Four a.m. just south of Charlottesville, NC and I'm just about lobotomized with Amtrak hospitality. So, let's talk gear some more! You see, REI has this policy about ticking luggage.. er, I mean about returning sleeping bags. Being one of those comfy owner-operated and year-end dividend paying yuppie neato enterprises, REI promises a satisfaction guarantee on all merchandise. So it was that way back in January I splurged and bought myself a $240 down bag. It had some fancy name like the Ripcord or the Tiger's Ballsack or something and it was all the rave with this year's mountaineers, or so I was told. I was thrilled. I had been learning lately that buying stuff really can be cool and, shallow as it sounds, new stuff really can make you feel better about yourself. I slept in my new mummy bag for damn near a month down on the boat, but I never quite felt at home in the thing. So, after I'd gotten it good and smelly from sleeping in it unshowered for weeks in the mildew-zealous environs of a sailboat berth in winter rains, I took it back. Oh, the girl as the REI counter loved me for that one. Actually, I think she really did. I think she was one of those kinky pheromone-junkies I've read so much about, you know, modern primitives who turn up their noses at perfumes and deodorants and prefer the good old fashioned musky scents of the animals we really are. Okay, I confess. I'm really talking about ME. I mean, I think she and I were alike in this way. I've never gotten down and dirty with a woman cloaked in pseudo-smells, be it $1000/oz. perfume or teenage girl tonic from Target. I hate the shit. A well-scrubbed woman to me is an invisible woman. Even if I can see the woman, I'd be hard-pressed to find her erogenous zones under perfumed-stinky sheets. Nope. Gimme a woman unshowered a day or two, and I'll give you a WOMAN! Oops. Once again I seemed to have strayed far afield from my intended message tonight. Hmmm. Just what was I talking about? Oh yes! Sleeping bags. So REI takes back my Rick-ripened Ripcord, the blue and black colored straightjacket of a high-dollar bag, and just when I'm getting somewhere feeling out the selection for myself, this profoundly deaf sales clerk overcompensating for his handicapp (barely improved by a set of honkin' hearing aids) touches the softy in me and suddenly I'm following him around buying every vowel-heavy object he reccommends. No matter that I can barely understand a word he's saying and that my deep-seated compassion for the disabled has completely blinded me to what I really came there to buy. It seems to make the kid really happy to be so adeptly helping me, so I don't fight it and leave the store considerably lighter in pocket and with some weird synthetic-fill bag that's even more confining than its predecesor. The only thing the new bag has going for it is its name: The Nootsack. I dig the name. Something to do with my longstanding love of Farley Mowat's Alaskan wolf study tale "Never Cry Wolf" in which the Mowat's last civilized outpost before disappearing above the Arctic Circle is a quirky "Northern Exposure-on-Acid" village called Nootsack. Well, perhaps just to get back at REI for sicking that deaf kid on me, I keep the bag another coupla weeks and give it my own brand of moose-dander sweetness, then return it as well. At last alone with REI's fine selection of God's Gift To Outdoor Slumber, I happen upon the Big Cat, a pale olive green bag that's vastly wider in the shoulders than any other mummy they've got. This has been my problem with the other bags: waking up at night fully zipped in and experiencing about 7 seconds of sheer hemmed-in horror as I struggled to get OUT of the damn thing, enough at least to free my arms. And the Big Cat has an advertising ploy that penetrates even my titanium-tough anti-bullshit defenses: The Big Cat comes in two models, a left and right zipper option, so that when one big cat finds another big cat on the Trail, you can zip your expensive-as-shit bags together and do the snuggle and the nasty right under Mother Nature's nocturnal nose. Cha-ching. It's mine. -RSM