“Cheerful & Unrested”

AT Day 48

Miles: 18.98 (+2.81 mile road road walk)

Total Miles: 893.3

(Waynesboro, VA)

Alright… so last night around this time I was getting ready to curl up into a little ball in the shower stall of Love Ridge Mountain Resort to hide out from the rain and avoid having to set my tent in the storm.

It was probably 3am when I gave up on the stall and pulled my sleeping pad out into the main part of the 3-stall bathroom. If one of the two who were bike/skating across the country needed to pee, I was willing to have them step over me. It felt like I didn’t get any sleep, but my watch registered some, and in all honesty, I felt pretty good on trail today, in spite of the bad weather. So I must have slept at least some. When that was however is a mystery to me. All I remember was the tossing and turning and trying to get comfortable without being able to fully extend my legs.

Didn’t want to go out into it this morning, but that’s also part of thru hiking. I feel spoiled even being able to pop off trail like I did last night. When that came up on the PCT I had to spend a night in a culvert to escape the weather. Shoot–Love Ridge offered to leave a frozen pizza out for me to cook when I arrived had I wanted to fork up the $15 they wanted for a f*ucking Desurno Pizza. Highway robbery, but I digress… I did not end up eating a pizza there. Stuck with Top Ramen instead.

In spite of the outrageously priced pizza, they had what appeared to be free coffee available this morning. Either that, or I’m currently on the run for stealing coffee from Love Ridge Mountain Lodging, or whatever-they’re-called.

Got me going, and I was out the door right at 8am (after another hot shower… I was paying $50 for a “camp site” after all, so I was going to get the most of what I paid). There was a 3 mile road walk and I expected that I’d be able to catch a hitch along the way, but only saw one vehicle the whole time. And it was a park service vehicle; they never pick up hitch hikers. Almost never.

So a rainy road walk, then a rainy trail walk.

I was smart enough to put on my rain pants, jacket, and umbrella this morning though. Yesterday I went without the rain pants, and although the world didn’t end, by the end of the day my shorts were soaked, and that just sucks having a wet ass… can’t really explain why it sucks so much, but it sure does.

But no wet ass today.

Happy pants instead.

There was surprising Trail Magic right at 5 miles into the trail this morning. Pouring down rain, and a father-and-daughter duo had a setup with burgers, chips, candy, and the like. I would have had 4 more burgers if I didn’t think it would have been awkward to keep saying “more protein please” so I settled for just the two. They wanted me to take some ‘tater salad, but how anyone likes that stuff is beyond me! So just burgers, then onto the trail.

Although I was mostly dry from my rain gear, the trail was hard to hike today. Day by day I get a better understanding of why people treat the AT with such reverence. It is a tough trail. The climbs are non stop, it seems. And after a rain like today, the rocks are slick as sh*t! Today I legitimately found myself somewhat worried about falling and hurting myself. I moved slower because of it, but still couldn’t put out of my mind the thought of falling. Then getting paranoid about “manifesting that sh*t” or whatever that means, and trying to think of something else.

At one point today there was a big group of what seemed to be high school students hiking the trail with a few adults. Must have been twenty of them. There was one in the back who seemed to have fallen and hurt herself. One of the adults was tending to what looked like an injured finger from a fall. I didn’t get a good look at what was wrong exactly, but the kid was really upset and clearly in a lot of pain. Hard for me to tell how much was actual pain and how much was just trauma from having taking a fall. I asked if there was any help that I could provide and both of the adults there said “no,” so I moved on. But I felt like there was help that I could have given… they seemed a bit in over their head. Not that I wanted to be in it with them, but I got the feel that they said “no” just because they didn’t want to interact.

Anyways, the kid having fallen just seemed to validate what I’d been feeling much of the day; namely that those rocks are slick and a fall could be bad news.

—

Had a bit of mushrooms after the trail magic, expecting that it could have maybe been challenging in the rain and wet trail, so didn’t eat very much. But the experience turned out to be surprisingly profound. Lord, how many times must I have written almost that exact sentence over the course of the last 48 days?

There was a moment where it was challenging, but that moment didn’t last long before giving way to a lot of mental clarity and some new ideas that I hadn’t found before today.

I know that I’ve been writing about the girl a lot the last ten days or so. And in light of that, I don’t want my bringing up a past relationship to seem like a reflection of that. In truth, a lot of the reason that I came to the AT has to do with a very bad ending to a very good relationship that I’d been in for 4 years before it ended in 2023.

I’ve had a lot of unresolved tension around the end of that relationship, and the trail was a way for me to get away from things back home, and a place for me to find time to process what I couldn’t get through while I was living in Arizona. I needed to get away, and I needed to find time to think.

The trail has provided both in abundance. Just as I knew that it would from having hiked before.

It’s also a lot of the reason that I chose to add the psychedelic piece to my hike of the AT–to crack open pieces that I might not otherwise be able to break. I tried the more reasonable approaches. They didn’t work. I needed something more dramatic. I needed to leave home, fly across the country, walk 2,200 miles, and adding psychedelics to the equation has helped too.

Today felt like a breakthrough, and like so many “breakthroughs,” it will undoubtedly be impossible to fully put into words. I’ll opt for brevity, as I’m becoming very tired as I write.

I was listening to a couple of songs that I have heard hundreds of times since high school. One song in particular, by one of my favorite bands came to mind. And I specifically searched it to listen to just that one song.

For some reason, it hit me completely different than it ever has before, and I understood the entire thing from an entirely different point of view. I literally stopped in my tracks on trail at the end of it and said, “that was a fucking breakthrough.”

There’s still a lot that I have unresolved with that breakup. It ended very badly with my partner saying some extremely terrible things to me in an effort to cause harm. The details probably matter, but there’s no time for them here or now. Another time maybe.

The harm that was done that night has stuck with me and been really hard for me to understand. Even now that almost 2 years have passed. I replay some of it through my head a lot still, even though I try not to.

But something about hearing that song again today, under the influence of the mushrooms, and seeing it from a different perspective than my own was enough to make me stop and stand there stunned. I was in absolute disbelief.

For the rest of the miles today I was in that state of feeling changed. It was profound.

In a big way I feel like I found forgiveness and understanding today. And I cannot understate how much that had to do with why I came out here to hike the AT. It’ll take more time still to integrate and make sense of. But for now, I feel closer to resolve.

Got to Rock Fish Gap, and there was a food truck selling kettle corn for a too much money. So I only bought one bag. Ate it while my ride into Waynesboro arrived.

Dude who shuttled me in was extremely nice, very kind, and super informative. The other two hikers who jumped in were messy, one was a dick to the driver, and neither of them tipped. It pisses me off when hikers leave that kind of impression.

He dropped me off at the YMCA where I got a shower and set up my camping across the street in this public park. Free camping here for a maximum of 3 nights. I think to keep it from turning into a homeless encampment. Shower at YMCA, ride to Cook-Out (Thanks Leo for getting me hooked on a fast food chain), and called both my parents while I ate more burger and milk shake than I probably needed.

Talked to a cute chick in Tennessee while I walked home and wondered about the strange way that life unfolds sometimes.

We have a fairly nice room booked in Harpers Ferry for the 3 nights she’ll be visiting next weekend. It’s far and away the best place that I will have stayed on trail, and isn’t at all “hiker amenity.” I sprung for something nice. It’ll be the half way point of the trail. It’s hard for me to know when we’ll be able to see one another next. And she’s driving 8 hours one-way to get here. So I didn’t mind spending a bit on that piece. It’ll be a nice break from trail, just as Trail Days was, but it’ll also be an awesome weekend with a girl I only recently met and barely know. But who I am developing stronger feelings for.

My phone is dying. My eyes are sleepy.

Will write again tomorrow.

Wormwood.