Date: 2004-04-05
To: Maine
Miles today: 15.0
Weather: light snow

April 5, 2004In my bag this morning I am a skydiver, belly toward the Earth, leggsraised at the knees, feet elevated (in this case to keep them above myheart til time to use them), my hands folded beneath me for warmth. Skydiver, basejumper, nothing between me and the Great Smokey MountainBear Enclosure but a few more minutes of snores, sleep-mumbles andmoans, and maybe even some real moans coming from the couple across theway, hard to tell. There are some two dozen of us laid out here at the"Fontana Hilton" this morning, still snozling, still squirming onThinsulite pads and wooden floors and bunks against the predawn cold. When I came here yesterday, i didn't like it at all. The whole scenecreeped me out and I wanted to flee immediately across the dam and intothe Smokies. But the Smokies have strict regulations regarding the "kindness" theyafford thruhikers and the one big rule is that we may sleep ONLY inshelters. There is no stealth camping allowed in the Smokies. Ipulled out my mileage book, consulted my watch and did the math. Nope. no way I would make it to the first shelter by dark. So with greatrestraint, I gave in to the forces of the Great Magnet, as Thompsoncalls it. I gave in and made my dinner instead at four in theafternoon. At that time, there were only two other thruhikers here,Doyle and Sunset. Nothing against them, but I don't know either ofthem , and my recent credit card rejection experience had me weirdedout and the whole post-apocalyptic environment of the dam, well, i justwanted out of there. But I calmly cooked instead, and as I cooked theparade of thruhikers began to appear from the south.   Mockingbird, nowNathan, now Shortcake, now Southie, now the Newleyweds, now Breahtlesssand Longjohn. Then the place felt okay. I was with my tribe again, orthey with me. The evening went nicely with the one not so nice aspectof Shortcake's resignation. The trail hadn't turned out to be as muchfun as she'd hoped for, and that was that. Sounded like a good areason as any. It would definitlely be one of mine, should it occur tobe less fun. Now this morning the birds begin to sing and outside the mummy wraps ofmy bag i hear the troops beginning to move about. A peek out of myhoodie reveals a lot more light in the room . the sun is by no meansUP yet, no way. But it's coming. And soon I will be diving, for real.Jumping off the dam as it were and into seventy miles of Smokies, themuch-touted and kinda haunted sounding Smokies with all them bears andscarey rangers and regulations and bears and, well, bears. Part of meenvys little Shortcake. She gets to go home now, no harm , no foul, noshame, and from the sounds of it she even has a home to go to. Most ofthese folks do. Most are much younger than I and thus still have theparental option. Most are in semi-daily contact with their parents toassure them that they are well and alive. I emailed my mother a weekago and still haven't heard back from her. But this goes both ways. She hardly got more than a minute's notice from me that I was doingthis, and not much of a farewell visit at that. But mom's got herhusband and her life, and dad the same, and I'm too frikken old to bephoning the parents all the time, and as safety nets go, they're notthere for me anymore anyway. So it's back to the freefall metaphor. Back to the skydivers crouch, or whatever that would be called, legsup, arms out, eyes Earthward, look out Appalachia, here I come. ¢RSMFontana Dam, North Carolina is what Hoover Dam or any damn dam willlook like if some hellish virus wipes out every living creature onEarth someday. It is a strange and eerie place. A giant concretemonument to.. to what? Ugliness. The dam is ugly and the body ofwater it creates is, by very nature of being manmade and awkwardly sowith its telltale dirt skirt shoreline where the waters recede, isugly. Shortcake says the whole dam complex reminds her of StephenKing's Langoliers. A place where nothing lives yet everything is stillin tact and all the machines still humming along, stupid, irreverent ofour absence. Sure, the shower there last night was nice and hot.   Butit was like showering in a mausoleum, all marble walls and steel doorsand concrete structure. There wasn't a soul in sight last night when Iwalked the half mile down from the shelter to the dam and the showers. I'm not complaining. It was kinda peaceful in the way I imagine deathis. I said it reminded me of Logan's Run, of the underbelly beneaththe city full of weird, 20-something people. But that reference wastoo distant perhaps for young Shortcake and Danny from Mass. Whatever.Someday somebody's gonna walk across a dam like this and say the samething about us, about me perhaps, about the free people who used towalk the now-gnarled and overgrown trail from Georgia to Maine. Intheir future time, perhaps there will be no such freedom, or perhapsthere be so few people that humankind will once again have clusteredtogether in fear and be afraid of the woods. Or perhaps it will go theother way, the way of too many. In this latter scenario, I don't seethe dam or the trail. I don't see anything. Anything but people. Butthat's not my hunch. My hunch is that this dam will always be aspooky, haunted place and that whatever push toward overpopulationcontinues into the coming decades will end, tragically probably,leaving the dams and other self-running machines to go on humming,quietly in a silent world. Afterthought: There are thousands of people walking this trail, all of them havingstarted around the same time as me and headed in the same direction. And I see a dozen or so every day. But on the trail, all I need do isstop a moment to write or push on ahead a little, and suddenly I am theonly man left in the world. It's baffling, really, how much spacethere is still left in the world, how much so-called emptiness that isalive and humming with living things with consciousness far beyond ourssuch that we call them vegetative or animal. While walking the Trail,I sometimes like to imagine that the trees are all actually moving veryquickly, and that I am just on such a different quantum time-spaceplane, that I cannot see their movement. I say all this both insupport of my idea of the solitary nature of the dam, and in contrastto it. The dam therefore is a blight and a joke, a falsity and a lameattempt made by men who do not walk the woods, to conquer it, to stopnature in her tracks. Nature will never stop, of that I am sure. Weare fooling ourselves with our dams. Nature has already destroyedthem.-RSM**For the full story of Rick's journey- visit Jigglebox.com**