Date: 2006-01-12
To: Git along, Little Butterball
Miles today: 0.0

It poured during the night, but I stayed dry in my tarptent. In the morning, the lower parts of the tent and the poles were ice covered. The tarptent (a Squall) is a little small for me. Trying to get out of my sleep silks and into my shirt, I brushed my bare back on the top of the tent, and wiped off several ounces of condensation. The droplets were about 33 degrees, just above freezing. Yeee-ooow. Cold. Maybe I should have gotten the largest tent after all.We opted not to eat right then, but to stop at the first Waffle House we saw, a tradition of Rockdancer¢s, and then continue on to Kincora Hostel.We found a Waffle House in short order, and ate while eavesdropping on the help, listening to their private conversations held waitress style - as each conversant was pulled away by waitressing duties, a reply to a comment went unanswered for a minute or two, but was always picked up later as though there had been no break in the conversation. The trip down to Kincora was even less eventful than the day before. In fact, the high point for me was discussing turkeys.Rockdancer said that the part of Virginia we were driving through once was the turkey-raising capital of the world. Back in the Twenties, the turkeys roamed free range and before Thanksgiving were rounded up on horseback in cowboy-type roundups. Picture it. Men on horseback chasing turkeys and driving them to the market. The image was ludicrous to me, but Rockdancer swore there were photographs showing the roundups.Herding turkeys? I recalled that my grandparents raised turkeys on their farm and my grandmother said they were the stupidest creatures alive. She said they were so stupid that they would drown in the rain by lifting their heads up to drink raindrops and then drown because they couldn¢t swallow with their mouths open and as long as water drops hit them they would keep their mouths open.She used to make us kids chase them into the coop whenever it rained, which was fun for an eight year old and his seven year old cousin. We¢d chase the turkeys and make them run, though rarely in the right direction. Only when we got tired and started to walk could we actually herd them into their pen and then into the coop.Once we tried to test my grandmother¢s notion that you could drown by letting rain drops fall in your mouth by holding our heads back in the rain and catching all the drops we could. The deal we had was that if either of us fell down unconscious or drowned, that the other would perform CPR. To perform CPR we decided that we would drag the other unconscious person over a large log. Luckily, we had such a log near my grandmother's house, an old pine tree about three feet in diameter that was laying on the ground in the woods behind the coop. The idea was that the conscious person would drag the unconscious one over to the log and drag him over the log to resuscitate him. We were unsure of the mechanics of doing this, or even how it worked, but knew it was true because at the YMCA we saw a film where a drowned man was revived by rolling him over a barrel. We figured that a log was just as good as a barrel and if it didn¢t roll it didn¢t matter because...well...because it didn't.We never got to test the theory because we couldn't catch many raindrops in our mouths, even in a downpour, and when we got even a little water in our mouths we would swallow without trying, even if we tried not to.Rockdancer and I arrived at Kincora about 4:00, and I was introduced to Bob and Pat Peoples, the incredibly kind and helpful folks who run the hostel.After talking a few minutes, Pat wandered off to care for her horses, and Rockdancer and Bob had lots to discuss (Rockdancer is somehow involved with the ATC and Bob is a newly-elected director in ALDHA).Left to myself, I started reading Yogi's PCT handbook, of which Bob not only had a copy, but a brand new copy with color photos. It was one of two sets that Yogi made up special (the other went to Miss Janet).Eventually Rockdancer and I made dinner. I had Zatarain's rice and beans of one flavor or another, augmented by chunks of turkey thigh I had brought down from NH. I ate half and put the other half in a ZipLoc baggie for later consumption.Bob turned on the hot water in the hostel so Rockdancer and I could take showers. We burned a significant amount of wood to keep us warm that night.