Date: 2008-03-04
From: Local Preparation

To: View Entry
Miles today: 0.0

Well, since I now have less than a month of 'Home Preparation Time,' I think that I'll use my new Appalachian Trail Song (see previous entry) to explain my view of the 'Annual Trail Phenomenon.' This is also sometimes called, 'Springer Fever,' and it might be compared to the 'Swallows Returning to Cappistrano...'*clearing my throat and preparing to sing*FIRST VERSE"Through piles of projects, I can see      Visions of the things to be,An ¢A.T.¢ hike, now that¢s for me,      Adventure a-round every tree¢¦REFRAIN:A North-Bound hike is painlessIt brings on many changesAnd I can take what comes for six more months..."I especially appreciate the efforts of the Trail Journals Administrators, who provide this site and the insights from a good sampling of annual backpackers. I'm certain that life continued before the establishment of this site, but at the moment, I can't remember exactly how...Read, oh Lurker and Would-Be-Thru-Hiker, the accounts and ramblings of my fellow journalists, who, if you pay close attention and read between the lines, are attempting to tell you the way it 'really is,' out there...Everybody brings their own bias and their own expectations to a hike such as this. I personally sat in a little cubicle in the Pentagon and longed for the 'Simpler Life.' -- the very same hallway that about one year after I retired was destroyed when a jetliner was crashed into it by terrorists...It's very easy to read these accounts and to focus on the good stuff -- glossing over what words simply cannot express:- What it's really like to have a freak thunderstorm come over the mountain and instead of rain, IT'S THUNDER SNOW! Worse yet, thunder sleet...- How annoying it can be to find yourself (a person who normally either sleeps alone or with one partner) all of a sudden in the very same shelter with perhaps ten other people who haven't showered lately and who, in the course of a typical night, burp; cough; sneeze; fart; rustle; shine headlamps in your eyes; scream at the nightly Mouse Olympics; grab your hand and shake you because they 'heard something out there,' talk (sometimes in normal tones at 2:00 in the morning; rise earlier than you; clatter and clang out a full three-course meal while you're trying to sleep; enter the shelter late and dripping wet (and the only open spot is right next to your warm and dry sleeping bag)... ...and you wondered why a sane person with perfectly good shelters built every-so-often along their route would bother to carry a three-pound shelter of their own...NOTE: I'm still not certain whether in close and crowded shelters, that I prefer to sleep opposite my fellow trekkers [my head to their smelly feet] or in the same direction as they [my head where I can smell the bad breath from a gaping mouth that snores -- or worse, catch their flu].- Especially in the early days -- to meet so many new fellow trekkers who 'plan to go straight through to Maine,' only to find hundreds of reasons to leave the trail in the fist hundred miles or so (sometimes in the first 13 -- Yes, there is a Ranger Camp about three miles down that gravel road at Cooper Gap and although they will not let you onto Post without a military ID card, the road to Dahlonega is just beyond their front gate...NOTE: They drop like flies in the first thirty or so miles, believe me.   HOWEVER, I find great satisfaction thinking back on my trail experiences and some of the people I've met -- not all of them Thru-Hikers (or even Trekkers, for that matter). So, as the song says, there really is, "...adventure around every tree..."Tomorrow, the Second Verse...