Date: 2011-05-28
From: Ed Garvey Shelter

To: Ensign Cowall Shelter
Miles today: 24.8
Weather: light rain

(In which I do not attempt the four state challenge and instead order cheesy bread from a shelter)At 6:45 in the morning Buffalo, Porter and Pace arrive at the shelter. I get up to chat with them, trying to be quiet to avoid waking the others, who do not yet have the thru-hiker early-to-rise habit. Porter and Pace convinced Buffalo to try the four state challenge, getting dropped off back at the Virginia border at 4am and hiking 40+ miles through West Virginia and Maryland to Pennsylvania. Since Buffalo's hiking partner Moosehead is planning on slowing down to meet some friends in PA and Porter and Pace's partner Deva is visiting DC, the new alliance makes sense. Though I might have considered joining the challenge if the timing and ride had worked out, I don't feel like I'm missing out by not attempting it, and expect to catch up tomorrow or the next day when they either slow down or zero to recover.I pass a campground with soda vending machines. Having dreamed of such things on hot days in the middle of the woods, I'm disappointed that when I finally find one it's so close out of town and early in the morning that I'm not particularly interested. When I reach the next campground with free showers I almost skip those too, but decide to take one mostly to wash my arm. The arm started out sore, but after a couple of hours of lightly using my walking stick, it mostly feels back to normal while hiking. When I unwrap my bandage for the shower, I'm pleased that it looks much better than the night before.Freshly showered with my arm rewrapped in new bandages, I hit the trail again. I run into the ridge runner for the area, identifiable by her ranger-like collared khaki shirt and her arm patches. Her name's Castle, having thru-hiked in '09, or Faren, being split like most ridge runners between her hiker and civilian identities. Though in her twenties, she has a faint, adorable lisp that reminds me of a much younger girl. I wonder how a lisp can be so endearing, and decide that my brain must associate it subconsciously with innocence and vulnerability. After I say goodbye to the ridge runner and we go our separate ways, I think about the story that Swift wrote in the register, and then of it's difficult lesson, and know that he was right.After seeing the four state challengers early in the morning, I see almost no other thru-hikers all day. The trail is filled instead with throngs of weekend hikers, and I see well over a hundred over the course of the day. They take little interest in me, busy talking amongst themselves in groups of two or three or four, and I try not to stare at the sudden influx of women. Luckily for thru-hikers, the weekend hikers seem not to know about or not want to use the shelter system for some reason, choosing instead to set up large, heavy looking tents at the many campgrounds and campsites.I hike alone for the first time in days, and I am glad for my iPod, which keeps me from getting lonely. I switch between music and podcasts, having found podcasts to be the easiest source of free content directly downloadable by the iPod Touch. I listen to All Songs Considered, The Moth, Selected Shorts, Starship Sofa, Escape Pod and The News from Lake Wobegon, thankful that the Towns Inn internet connection was fast enough for me to download more than a hundred hours of podcasts. I keep one ear free, and when I see someone I might want to talk to I take the earbud out of the other ear as well.I reach the last shelter at 7:30pm, a sweet spot for making the most out of hiking in the daylight while still having enough time for dinner and camp set up. The only other people in the shelter are three guys who had planned to stay out for three nights but are hoping to get picked up tomorrow after realizing this afternoon how tiring it is to walk up and down mountain with a heavy pack on your back. If I had to carry one of their packs I'd probably want to quit after a day also; as much as conditioning, the less-is-more mentality of thru-hikers is one of our most important assets.The shelter log book lists the number of a pizza place that delivers to the parking lot 0.3 miles from the shelter, and I use one of the weekenders phone to order cheesy bread and root beer, the first time I've ordered food from a shelter since my birthday. The delivery guy is 45 minutes late and has forgotten my soda but is apologetic and only takes five bucks, saying that it was his fault. Having not expected to have to wait past dark, I use the light from my iPod to help me walk back, holding it close to the trail to avoid roots and mud. I have far too much cheesy bread to eat, and don't want to have to figure out how to hang it from the mice, but luckily the weekend guys are game for a late, second dinner, and together we just barely polish it off.Tomorrow will be my third and final day in Maryland, which has been a good state to me, short and sweet, and my first in my old state of residence, Pennsylvania. Having walked through states that I hadn't previously spent much time in before, it will be fun to enter one where I have lived. The geography of the trail so far may as well have existed in a different dimension, and I look forward to having it begin to overlap that of the real world I'm familiar with.