Date: 2004-05-25
To: Maine
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: light rain

May 25, 2004Mile 688: Catawba, VAThat was bound to happen eventually. Last night, the whole of thebottlenecked trail all descended at once on the Catawba hostel,someone's garage generously opened up for hikers to kick it, have ashower, play horseshoes. A note right in the Hiker's Handbook warnedagainst seeking out this place for a quiet night's rest. There areabout a dozen pissed-off thruhikers on the trail today, most of themover 50, who apparently missed that warning in the book.I came upon the place utterly spent. One hardcore day of heinousascents and descents that culminated, without any warning in theguides, in the Dragon's Tooth, a seven-mile departure from our Northerntack that nailed us halfway with incredibly arduous bouldering, stuffyou wouldn't normally do with a pack on, no way. There were placeswhere one could easily have died, fallen, and not likely have beenfound for some time. The whole hump out to the "Tooth," a giganticpile of rocks with a grand overlook that I was too tired to see, waslike scaling up and down the ridges of a dragon's tail. Anticipatingmy normal pace of about 25 minutes/mile, I ran out of water halfwaywhen the 7 mile jaunt turned into a 7 hour jaunt. Needless to say when I hit the hostel, or garage, whatever it was, Iwas thirsty, spent and mad as hell at the trail engineers who'd madethe Dragon not an option but a must-do section of the AT. And Kayliss handed me a beer. Heaven. I grabbed a cot in thetres-red-cross shelter-looking garage, and headed into the localquickie mart in the back of a truck driven by Joe, the 16-year old sonof the host, about a mile at 80 mph or so around sharp curves, a bunchof us beer and grub-seekers holding on for dear life in the bed of thetruck. Before long there was something like six cases of beer floating aroundthe crowded garage. Cute but unworldly Pilot snapped pictures of themen all sprawled about in front of the garage drinking beer. At thatpoint in the evening, she still found it funny.It didn't take long to cure that. By dusk, the place was a circus. Somany hikers are clogged up on this section of trail in central Virginiathat before long not only was the garage full but a tent city hadsprung up in this guy's yard. With three dozen thruhikers as hiscaptive audience, young Joe gave it his 16-year old all, poppingwheelies and roaring across the resident acreage at top throttle on hisdirt bike. Much like their Marmaduke-like pet dog who stood barkingincessantly just his side of a buried electric doggie fence begging ourattention, Joe drove that bike as fast and hard as he could within theconfines of the football field-sized yard. No longer content even with that, he began weaving in and out of thetents in the yard behind the garage. But he was a good sport. He'dstop every once in a while to drive the newest arrivals to the localstore for beer and grub. By dusk we were all getting hammered, youngand old, male and female, but mostly male, as is the demographic hereon the All-Testosterone AT. What happened next was just a matter ofcourse.A drinking game sprang up out front of the garage. With Beat Box atthe helm, we went around in a circle naming celebrities by the lastletter of the preceding star's name, and when one failed to deliver animmediate answer, the penalty was drink.   As night fell, a lot ofhikers did what they do every night out in the woods at nightfall, theywent to bed. We didn't.Before long, we were asked to keep it down. Immediately someone in thedrinking game circle cited the passage in the manual warning againstexpectations of any quiet at this shelter. Spokesperson Pilot wentback inside. Okay, so the book warned them. But should we rub their noses in it? Iasked myself. I moved that we relocate the game 50 yards away at apicnic table on the lawn. We did. And very quickly the topic of thewordplay game sunk from celebrities to porn stars, real or imagined. To the credit of the group, some incredibly creative porn star nameswere created around that table. However, with this new topic andincreasing inebriation, the decibel level rose dramatically. To thosetrying to sleep in the garage, it likely sounded not as though we'dmoved the party away, but that we'd crawled in bed with them andsnuggled up to laugh drunkenly in their ears. Well, eventually quite contentedly drunk and anesthetized from my day'spains on the Dragon Tooth, I sauntered into the garage and plopped downon my cot. I was half asleep when something strange began to happenall around me. Silhouetted hikers seemed to dance around the garage,every one with halogen headlamps beaming like a buncha modern miners,and every one of them stuffing bags with dark objects.It took awhile, but I finally caught on. The drinking game had endedand the seven hardcore men had decided to pack up and hike out, rightthen and there. Naturally, I joined them. They had to wait for me as I stumbled aroundin the dark. Krispy Kritter took a group photo of all the boys packedand ready to go, one you could probably see by referencing his name onTrailjournals.com. Pack thrown together out of rote habit developed over two months (withno real clue as to what I might be leaving behind in that garage), Ihoofed it down the driveway and onto the empty highway for the .3 milewalk back to the trailhead. Back to that tiny hole in the forest wallwe walked, a hole no wider than a household doorway, two holesactually, one on either side of the rural highway, where hikers of theAppalachian Trail enter and exit the Real World all the time, likelymost often entirely unnoticed by passing automotive traffic.I had never hiked drunk before. And I doubt I've done much if anyhiking in the dark. So it was a double adventure. I found veryquickly that I had a problem with the normal positioning of myheadlamp. When pointed low enough to see the ground, the light's beamlit up my glasses making it hard to gauge depth. (This was not merelya function of drunkenness. I have since tried it sober.) So I justshut it off, followed closely the person in front of me and availedmyself of the brain's aptitude for instantly recalling what it saw amoment ago in the light ahead. I was impressed at how well Iperformed. I never once fell. But the going was fairly easy, the terrain smooth. After a shortdistance in the woods, during which Beat Box, perhaps the drunkest ofus all, rattled off every crass dead baby and paraplegic joke I'd everheard in one unending monologue, we hit a meadow. Fireflies danced inthe air, popping like ten thousand tiny flashbulbs over the grass,brilliant against the dark backdrop of the forest beyond and pure magicto my liquid yet lucid brain. And with my headlamp off, I got all thebenefit of their brilliance. We walked for some time in tall grass, and the magic of the firefliesjust made the night! A line of Appalachia's mountains, perhaps some ofwhich we'd climbed the day before or would climb tomorrow, could beseen clearly outlined, backlit perhaps by the distant city lights ofRoanoke. It was a beautiful night, one well worth the pain suffered later in themorning upon sobering up. We the warriors of the long trek north gotto blow off some steam, share a lot of laughs, and be witness to a kindof low-flying aurora borealis in a pasture somewhere in west-centralVirginia. The fireflies!! When walking amongst so many fireflies, one has also the illusion of ameteor shower unfolding in the sky. For every time a firefly goesbuzzing by overhead, in the dark without depth perception, one can'tdifferentiate between the bug and a shooting star.   Earlier that day, well-before the tortures of the Dragon's Tooth butafter a morning of hard climbing, I'd made this note to myself todevelop later: "creek. falls. foot massage. fishies. it is enough."I'd arrived at a fairly-good flowing stream, and while a few otherhikers splashed their faces at the footbridge, I'd gone downstream,found a small waterfall, stripped off pack and emptied pockets andjumped right in. It was Heaven on Earth after the morning's labor andhumid heat. In a pool deep as a claw foot tub, I had flip-flopped fromdunking my head under the falls to turning, laying back in the pool andletting the falls massage my feet. In that position I watched the fishswim around beside me in crystal clear water. It was indeed enough. The beer and fireflies and Seven Dwarf-like comradery of the nighthikers just added to it all. Another day on the Appalachian Trail. Itis enough. It is more than enough. -RSMMile 714Thursday, May 27 2004Shazzam!! Like lightning popping off right near you and that crash ofsound, instant, thunder, boom! or the zip-zap miracle of instantinformation transfer from a little device in your hand standing deep inthe woods, baffled by it all, then whoosh! With the alacrity of anemail reached, read & returned, zang! I'm out of the woods and in thepassenger seat of a next-year model BMW beside a pretty, wild-spirited19-year old chauffeuring her brother, his girl and me far, far away fromthe relentless & intrepid AT, spiriting us away like some angelic elfout of the dark forest, taking us to.. The Beach!   Wow. I feel like Kerouac's Japhy Ryder or Kerouac himself as Ray inDharma Bums, whisked away on the rails or an easy Zen hitch fast out ofone glorious exultant moment straight into another, totally different,always exciting. Japhy in his logger shirts and rucksack stepping outthe mountains yodeling and into the way of Ray, hitching, tramping,back into the perpetual motion that was me with too many cars andendless Zen patience for the drive. Now observing Eric's little sister Karen-O as she maneuvers the stealthGerman road machine down interstates and out of Virginia, changing thevolume of the stereo pumping out Smashing Pumpkins without so much as aglance at the console, all done with covert controls on the wheelitself, and the car flying, erasing in minutes what just took me allmorning to hike, in hours what took me a month, back South parallelingthe AT to Charlotte, North Carolina. Whoosh. Effortless. Going tothe coast to dive in the ocean, to revel in the holiday weekend, toseize the day memorial, to celebrate with my brother America when hecelebrates. On schedule with the western world and the working man, Ibust out a last batch of "work" on Thursday morning and clock out atnoon, leave early and to hell with Friday. Zero Day? How about a ZeroWeek? Adios, AT and all your ankle-twisting snaking phallic roots andREAL snakes, the venomous and rattling kind that have popped upunderfoot EVERYWHERE in the past week, coiling up and into the forestexperience a new, added sense of danger and sinister slitheringfreakiness. Adios, AT "Nobo" peligroso. I'm taking a week. Off.How did all this come about? Miraculously, of course. It all startedin Damascus weeks ago. Or maybe as far back as Day One when I firstmet Eric & Jess just North of Springer Mountain, Georgia. Nothingspecial that first day or the next, but memorable as our first meeting,all of us launching North in what could be called the Great EasternStates Social Trek of Aught Four. When I tell people I hail from ahamlet just off the Pacific Crest Trail in soCal, always the questionof why not the PCT first and always I answer easily that I chose the ATfor its social life. To undertake the 2600 mile PCT alone as my firstand actually only big trek of its kind would have been a lonesome andlikely thus unsuccessful endeavor.Jess, Eric and I became fast friends in the weeks that followedSpringer, especially after the Smokey¢s moving on into Virginia. InDamascus we sadly parted ways when they had to go Off Trail for awedding for over a week. It would be 250 miles at a lowball average often miles a day before we'd meet again. Thanks to a couple of emailsand notes in shelter registers from me forward in time to them,arriving at said shelter a week or more later, they knew where I wasand I knew they were moving fast to catch me, skipping as they did thebig thruhiker beer bash in Damascus so as to make up time. Just as they were closing the gap between us, however, I slipped intosome kinda possessed overdrive, driven forward at a juiced-up pace in arace to escape a crowded knot of thruhikers with whom I felt I hadnothing in common and just wanted to lose in the woods. It took a weekand several heavy beatings at the hands of sandstone up thrusts andmean, anything-but-northbound jags for me to realize that the onlysmart solution was to simply stop.Stop I finally did with monumental mental effort on the Wednesdayleading up to Memorial Day Weekend. At first I just slept in, anot-uncommon practice of mine, utterly incomprehensible to hardcore bigmilers who rise with the sun and roar across the dank morninglandscape, only to poop out at 3 or 4, and witness (with a snarl) as Ipass them in the magic light of late afternoon. Once up, I sat at thecampsite picnic table in Lambert's "Meadow" (a meadow when named nowlong since a dense forest), a table a real luxury occurant outside therealm of a shelter only in National Park sections of the trail. It'shard to convey the "why" and "how" of how hard it was watching withoutfollowing as one after another of my fellow thruhikers passed me by. For the first time perhaps in 700 miles on the trail, I felt thefamiliar jones of the unmedicated junkie not for drugs or alcohol orsex for a change, but for the hike. [Second half of this story lost in cyberspace transit.. to be reconstituted from my memory and posted today or tomorrow.]Note on next two maildrops: Due to bizzare circumstances, I will now not be in Harper's Ferry until June 15th. Love your cards and letters, they keep me going and sate the lonely spot in me for my friends in the worlds of art, cars, and general gonzo craziness. So, now you've got another week for the Harper's Ferry address. Thank you. -Rick