Date: 2017-08-16
From: The Cabin hostel

To: The Cabin hostel
Miles today: 10.1
Weather: overcast clouds

After getting beaten up in the Whites and southern Maine I am tempted to take a zero for the first time. Instead, I take Bear's offer to slackpack me ten miles to South Arm. It's a compromise that keeps me moving and reduces my guilt while giving me most of the afternoon off to rest.First Honey and Bear offer us a huge country breakfast - blueberry pancakes, sausage, eggs, fruit, and biscuits and homemade gravy ("That's all the southern boys want" Bear tells me). I eat too much, and that's saying something. They load up Pretty Boy, Turtle, and Salty Camel with leftovers since they won't be returning.Hopper drives Pretty Boy and me to last night's trailhead and we set off. Despite the term "slackpack" I carry everything I own as I always do. It's easy going for six miles: leafy packed dirt trail that gently follows the contours of the land. Few rocks and fewer boulders and no sharp vertical changes. We make better time than we have in days. We pass Success Pond with an old cedar-shingled cabin that's gone into disuse. Usually these are burned down but this one is being slowly stripped of anything useful like floorboards and insulation.Bear has asked if I'd mind taking some blowdowns off the trail after Turtle reported them yesterday on his slackpack. I find a few birch trunks I can lug off the trail - gravity helps where it's hillside - and for one that's still rooted in I take out the handsaw Hopper gave me and cut it back. There are some 8 to 12 inch birch logs that will need the chainsaw crew another time. Unfortunately they're four miles from the nearest road so it may be awhile. But overall it's well maintained trail. Bear regularly asks other hikers to change out the toilet paper in the privies along this stretch (an unexpected luxury) and check the shelters and logbooks. Hopper keeps trashcans at the road crossings and collects the bags every day.In March Bear and Honey were down in Georgia to support Hopper as she was part of a crew carrying a paraplegic along the trail to experience the AT. The couple also annually hosts a group of Wounded Warrior vet hikers with a steak and lobster dinner. In fact today there is one of this group, Matt, recuperating upstairs. He was too tired to come to breakfast but I meet him later. Bear also has a habit of refusing payment from people that can't afford it. He and Honey run this hostel as a labor of love and use their other retirement income to keep it going.   We break at a shelter where about a dozen other hikers gradually filter in. We don't recognize any of them except for Andre (or Moose) the seventeen-year-old I met near Franconia Notch. He did a lot of miles in the Whites and is on track to finish this month. I ply a 67-year-old local section hiker named Uncle for info on the upcoming terrain. He rambles on in an upbeat decisive tone but ultimately tells me nothing new. The elevation profiles don't look bad, but after the last few days I don't want to be surprised again by difficult terrain.I'm done by two and Hopper is waiting at the road, handing out popsicles to hikers. She drops me in town for lunch at the General Store and I get a good look at Andover. I finally find Moxie, a Maine-only soda that Sara, the kids, and I love, at Mill's Market. Back at the Cabin I find Bear enjoying happy hour outside the garage and he sends a bottle of white wine around. He wants me to slack the next section tomorrow and come back. He's very earnest, and makes me feel like he's going to miss having me around. I finally convince him I have to move on and he calls his friend in Rangeley to set me up there for the night. Hopper brings in a new hiker, OMG, and Bear immediately makes her feel like family as well. Floater, the girl recovering from Lyme, hiked up Old Blue today and is going to slack the 13 mile section tomorrow Bear wanted me to do. This will be her first major test. OMG will join her. As we file in to dinner Bear confides that he would like nothing else but to get back to hiking himself. A recent stroke makes that very difficult. Honey has made a huge spaghetti dinner with homemade meat sauce and garlic bread. Again I stuff myself. Matt the vet explains how his group has become separated out along the trail. He's miffed at one girl in the group, not a vet herself, who just hiked the highlights then summited Katahdin just to be first and presented herself as a thruhiker on social media. It's an interesting question because although thruhiker has a formal ATC definition, hiking the AT is really about hiking your own way and not caring how anyone else hikes. Only you know what you really did, whether you passed every blaze or took a few shortcuts. Some purists look down on slackpacking, for instance, so it's a slippery slope to claim the high ground. Ultimately we are not out here to get medals or recognition, but to find something in ourselves or the world that we didn't know, or maybe have forgotten. If someone wants to brag of an achievement they didn't earn and thus degrade the cachet of being a thruhiker, it only hurts us if we are doing this for external recognition and rewards. The vast majority of the people I've met are not. I lay on the bed after dinner to plan tomorrow's hike but am soon asleep. I wake around midnight to pitch black. Outside it's clear and I get my first unobstructed look at a dark sky. The Milky Way and nebulae are clearly visible. I have to focus on individual stars to see all the fainter stars around them. A shooting star passes, flaming out in an instant.