Date: 2004-10-09
From: Baxter

To: Katahdin
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: overcast clouds

Summit DayOctober 8, 2004(continuation)Yazzy catches up to me where I sit trailside plugged in to my headphones and writing, my chair a thickly-mossed stone. I pull of the phones and, while we wait on Frank, the slower of our ad hoc threesome, I read to her from my steno scribblings. I've been musing over Thoreau.Early in my ascent of Kaatdn, "the grandfather," I had pictured Thoreau, his now-150-year-old tuburculor dust of bones reanimated and humping it up the mount beside me. He'd have a gramophone strapped to his back, its giant cone blasting Bach, Mahler, Mozart into his head, a super-inflated, outdated & cumbersome version of today's iPod. I would gently suggest to the poet that he might enjoy the fidelity and lightness of my "music machine." A man who cursed the "iron horse," throwing rocks at passing trains in protest of that brand of progress, Henry would not be an easy sell on the mp3 player. But eventually he would try the tiny purveyor of massive sound and smile. It would be the smile of Frank when I shared a Fosters lager with him atop Killington, a smile of surprise, gratitude and pure childlike joy.Frank has a walking stick he calls Thumper. Thumper was taller than Frank in Georgia, but now, thanks to the friction of 2200 miles, a lot of it rocky, Thumper stands roughly two feet shorter. We became a "summit team" of sorts the other day when Frank caught up with me at Abol Bridge. I'd heard, in advance of his arrival, that he was working hard to catch up so as to summit with Yaz and me. I was honored. Frank had several visions of how to "Go out in style!" to finish the trail with a special flair. First, he was gonna rent us a limousine out of Millinocket to pick us up at Katahdin Stream Campground and ferry us out of Baxter State Park in style. But Frank had naught but the same evil "cell phone pay phone" to work with that I'd struggled with there at the Abol Bridge store. That, and not enough advance notice. He met only with voice mail and answering machines and underlings who weren't authorized to make the necessary arrangements. For a navy commander no doubt accustomed to getting results, I thought he handled it pretty well. Rejection that is. Small town ineptitude. Communications failure. We can visit the moon, and a pro climber dying of hypothermia atop Everest (Rob Hall?) could, in his final hours, dial out on his satellite phone. But could he call in a rescue helicopter? No. Helicopters don't fly that high. All he could do was reach his pregnant wife in England to say goodbye. And in our little anonymous fringe world of AT Champions, a just-retired military man, a commander of six ships and six thousand men, could feed quarters to a stupid beast of a cell phone bolted to a tree in Maine's 100-Mile Wilderness until he was blue in the face. But could he score three olympians a soundproof stretch with black leather seats and a wet bar to "roll" off the trail in a style befitting olympians? No. Technology is the under-appreciated man-servant of our time. A slave on the brink of freedom, he labors only so far, then watches with wry grin as we flounder in his absence. Technology, when tasted out here in the trees, is alkaline on the tongue. It tastes of irony and has more holes in it than swiss cheese. Consequently, we left Abol Bridge a little less enthused, having got our hopes up, then dropped, one plan shot.Frank catches up to us and we three walk together awhile. I've hiked with Frank perhaps a total of 100 miles on the whole AT, and I have never seen him fall. We all fall. Rocks and roots and that occasional temptation to look up and see the sky whilst hiking, to look left or right while underway (always a big mistake) and bamm! You go down. Everyone falls. But pride dictates that it is best to fall when alone, kinda like the tree falling in forest when no one's around. No one saw it. It didn't happen! Pride aside, falling in the company of a partner is better. There's empathy, a hand up off the ground. So we're rambling down the trail toward the finish line, or rather, "back from the finish line" to our limo-less parking lot. It's Frank setting the pace, then Yazzy, then me in the rear. And I'm rambling aloud, talking about something. A grainy rainbow of leaves falls from the trees as we walk. I reach out to catch a leaf as it falls and nearly trip in the momentary lapse of attention to the ground. In response to something Frank has said about keeping in shape, I rattle off the one rule I remember from Torrey Pines High School Physics 101, "A body in motion stays in motion; a body at rest stays at rest." A real no-brainer when you analyze it, but then again a salient thought in a rather brainless world. No sooner does the word "rest" fall from my lips than frumple-umpalump! Down goes Frank. Just seconds ago, a body in motion, now suddenly, as though by the voodoo of my voice, a body at rest. The timing is too bizarre, and to my horror I'm stifling a laugh. Yazzy and I help him up and, once assured he's okay, just bust out laughing. It is Frank's first fall in the company of others, and he can't help but laugh himself. We all fall. Frank's second grandiose idea, the limousine an apparent impossibility, had been to rent a cabin in Baxter. Frank fancied a little extra comfort as a nice way to prepare for our final day on The Trail. When Frank offered to pay, we doubly concurred. On the AT, I learned the two operative words were Yes and Thank You. Three words. Though it may indeed be better to give than to receive, there is no wisdom in denial of kindnesses offered by big-hearted people. Turns out the weekend of our arrival in Baxter was the most popular choice for tourists and day hikers. And for good reason. On the following Friday, the mountain would be closed for the season. For workaday people with real jobs, this was the last chance weekend in the season to clamber up the Katahdin trail and see the foliage and breathe the alpine air of one of the few and righteously magnificent places on Earth special enough to draw Henry David Thoreau from his womb of Concord, Massachusetts northward on a journey later told of in "The Woods of Maine."And come they did, in droves, (but not so many summit climbers that our gigantic mob of finish-line-ecstatic thruhikers didn't eclipse them at the top) and thus had likely long-ago reserved all the cabins to be had in Baxter State Park. So to The Birches we headed, the somewhat remote yet thruhiker-designated camp spot, but lucked instead into a couple of lean-tos right at the base of the 5-mile trail to the top. Birches or lean-tos, either way it was $9 a head. It was a fair compromise. Still, no limo and no cabin. Two carrots dangled in the face of a jackass, and I'd reached out for both. Only one who has ascended and descended half a million vertical feet in one long, physically & mentally daunting journey and lived without any creature comforts for the duration could possibly understand how good Frank's visions of comfort sounded. If you think a limousine would be a welcomed break from an office desk and an urban, traffic-choked world, imagine what it would have felt like to Frank, Yazzy and me. To any of us.That night, our last night on the trail before the final climb, a parade of my gonzo thruhiker peers, Gordy, Coyote, Sunshine, Munchkin, Seraphin, Big Stick and Ski Bum among them, most of them twentysomething women and not one of them hard on the eyes, so to speak, came marching into basecamp at twilight in naught but their birthday suits and packs on their backs. Hilarious. Fantastic. Ecstatic. The fireflies of the South had long disappeared, but that night the girls of The AT Class of 04 lit up the night with their "sparkler dims" as Kerouac said. A bawdy band of triumphant goddesses, they came singing through the trees for all to hear and danced into camp in NOT EVEN their underwear! Yazzy joined them at some point after I lost consciousness. I hit the Thermarest at 6:30 p.m. and was out cold in minutes. Yazzy woke me a short time later, managed to get me to half sit up long enough to fork down some terriaki noodles she'd kindly cooked up. Departing thruhikers from that day's summit party had given Yaz a "30-rack" of Budweiser to take and share among our gang, and next door Frank stoked up a big bonfire expecting our arrival on the scene any time. But all I could manage on that great dark yet shimmering magic song-filled night were a few sips off one 12-ounce can of beer, and down went my head again, out for the night. Yaz claims, and I vaguely recollect from the deepest of dream sleep, that she made several attempts at rousting me throughout the evening. Was I ill? Had I drugged myself out on sedatives? Neither. I just crashed. Their final bash was my final crash. Was I sorry I missed it? A little. But not really. Not yet. I'd had the blessing of these angels' company on many, many a night and through many a hiking day and days in towns all along the way. I slept contented that night, happy for all of us, for the Dreamers-become-Doers, for the beaters-of-all-the-odds. Had I foreseen, however, how very lonesome a victory t`would be when all went home, myself included, and the November hours I would spend curled up in a ball against a world that couldn't or wouldn't relate, well, I might well have torn myself from sweet sleep to be among my people one more night. -RSM