Date: 2005-04-27
From: Overmountain Shelter, (NC/TN?)

To: Buck's, Roan Mountain, TN
Miles today: 8.7
Weather: light rain

I don¢t know if I¢m all that impressed with this legendary shelter. It¢s big, yeah, and that¢s cool enough, and it would probably be picturesque if the sun would actually come out so that you could see the thing, but the boards holding it together are separated, on average, by quarter-inch gaps, and what this means is that it¢s windy as hell inside. The night was cold. The storm was mostly over by morning, and we held out a brief hope that it would turn into the sort of sunny, lay-out-all-your-belongings-and-spend-a-lazy-couple-of-hours-letting-everything morning perfected back at that Pile of Logs Quote Unquote Shelter before Hot Springs. The hope lasted long enough for nearly everyone to leave the shelter, preferring to start walking, and long enough yet after that for me to face a missing-spork crisis head-on. (A crisis that is still unresolved, I should add. Where it could possibly have gone is beyond me; I HAD it last night. Oh, my spork.) Alas, just as I began to think that my socks might actually have a chance this morning to really, truly dry out, another bank of clouds sailed in, and it began to mist and then to rain. A chorus of curses and ineffectual whining rose from us stragglers as we dashed out into the cold, yanking socks and T-shirts off the tree branches over which they¢d been draped.¢I just wasted the ONE hour of sunlight this morning waiting for stuff to dry,¢ said Pacman, a little bitterly. I sighed, at the too-real prospect of wrapping dirty AND wet socks around my knees. Again. The things you do for love, if you know what I¢m saying. (But as Dave says: ¢AT, I talk shit about you, but secretly I like you.¢) I eyed my soggy rainjacket malevolently, which wasn¢t especially just ¢ I¢d have better eyed the sky malevolently ¢ but one cannot always be held accountable for one¢s behavior under stress. ¢Rain AND wind?¢ said Dave. ¢Ooh, maybe it¢ll be muddy, too! The trifecta!¢Still whinging a little, but mostly good-naturedly, the boys and I headed over the balds. Dave¢s leg was hurting him, and everyone was thereby persuaded to adopt what Pacman calls ¢the patented Break a Leg pace: good for what ails you.¢ (Everyone but me; that¢s just how I walk. Slowly.) ¢Yeah,¢ I said, ¢two miles an hour: you heard it here first, folks.¢ So I led a snakelike procession over Hump and Little Hump (hehe), and Nick told us all about Finnish food, and Dave told us all about how he got his dog, and eventually we made it to Apple House Shelter where we stopped briefly, long enough for Captain Chaos to appear, and Pacman practiced his empathic listening skills on the good Captain as we all headed the last half mile out to the road. We hitched a ride into Roan Mountain where a couple of people needed to go to the post office; met Cyclehiker and Treetrunks there. Cyclehiker wanted to know what I do ¢in real life,¢ saying I was strangely articulate for a hiker. I said, ¢Most recently, low-paying retail.¢ So it goes.We ended up at Buck¢s Diner for lunch; the Bruces and Burn and Piker and Mileage were there, too, and though we¢d intended to get back out on the trail that same afternoon, somehow it was getting late before we¢d noticed it, and Piker and Mileage and the Bruces said they were going to crash in Buck¢s apartment next door and we were welcome to crash there too if we wanted. Thus it was that I found myself sleeping on an old orange shag rug smelling vaguely of cat, in a sea of fellow hikers, but not before many milkshakes and a few Zimas were consumed, and an episode of Jeopardy was watched.Conversational topics of the evening: sex work, transgendered hikers, transgendered non-hikers, the amount which some people might or might not be willing to pay for a hiker¢s used socks, watermelons, Edmund Burke, art criticism, and the French Revolution.