Date: 2011-06-20
From: 0.3 miles after Kirkridge Shelter

To: The Church of the Mountain Hostel, Delaware Water Gap
Miles today: 6.1
Weather: scattered clouds

(In which I reach the edge of Pennsylvania and teeter on its brink)We rock a going-to-town pace in to Delaware Water Gap and arrive before 10am. It's a quaint little town with a church hostel, pizza shop, outfitter and bakery. We check in at the hostel, where we meet an assortment of new and old hikers, some of whom I hadn't expected to ever see again. I see Schmuck and Hazard again, along with Spark, Timber and Red Bull. Even on the slow train I'm often surprised by who I run in to and when.After a lunch at the pizza shop, we decide to head in to the much bigger neighboring town of East Stroudsburg, which has amenities that include a Walmart, a library and a mall. After convincing Spark and Denim, a sectioning southbounder, to come along, we have enough people for a shuttle. We wander around Walmart with no aim more specific than buying snacks and marveling at the selection, then catch a local bus over to the library for the internet.Riding across town on the bus I can see that East Stroudsburg is a real town, and for the first time since Georgia I feel like the trail has returned me to civilization as I know it. There are people of varied ethnicities, wide selections of stores and shops and movie theaters, and streets with cafes and parks that I could imagine sitting at. Having already planned to zero, I'm glad that I will have such an assortment of options as to how to spend my time.Another bus brings us back to Delaware Water Gap, where we gaze in awe at the impressive selection of pies and pastries at the bakery. After much agonizing we decide to split a chocolate cream cheese pie and I get a loaf of fresh bread to share at the hostel.In the evening an obscurely familiar hiker shows up at the hostel. "Remember me?" he asks, but as is so often the case, I can't put a name to the face. It turns out to be Buckeye Flash, another hiker I have not seen since my birthday party. "My daughter reads your journal every day, she keeps telling me that Portrait did this and that," he says, and I recall her guestbook entry from several weeks ago. It's as close to meeting an actual fan that I've come, and it's a novel little thrill to get a tangible reminder that there are people who sometimes read what I write.Writing a journal has been a rewarding experience, including in ways that I hadn't anticipated (how disappointing it will be after the trail to have interesting encounters, only to recall that I'm no longer writing a trail journal). But it has not been, as I think I had assumed without thinking specifically about it, a way to connect with other hikers on the trail. I think that if I were to embark on a similar hike again I would consider a creative outlet that was more easily shared with other hikers, for example an ongoing comic strip in the registers. Something like this isn't on the face of things mutually exclusive with writing a daily journal, but in practice I find that one daily extracurricular activity in addition to hiking is the most that I can comfortably sustain.Tomorrow is the summer solstice and the traditional naked hiking day. Sadly it is also a day I had planned to zero, and I suspect that the locals would frown upon a zero-naked day. With luck I will, however, watch my first movie on the trail, breaking my longest movieless streak since I started keeping track more than a decade ago.