“The Making of a Bitter Old Man”

AT Day 70

Miles Today: 21.06

AT Mile: 1261.4

(Palmerton, PA)

“Absolute bullshit, if you ask me!” The old man grumbled at me yesterday while I was trying to write and he was trying to be heard in his grumbling.

He’d been going on and on about all the things in the world and in his life that are terrible, while I glanced over his direction intermittently to give enough attention so that he didn’t feel ignored, but also not so much that I was distracted from my thoughts. As I continued writing he continued telling me about how “they” are going to close down and demolish the Ekville Shelter and how he’d been the site host there for over 30 years.

“Can I ask what you think of Donald Trump?” He asked, seeming to take his rant in a dramatic new direction. But before I could answer he fortunately filled in the blank with his own opinion: “I hate the bastard! And technically he’s my landlord…”

Before becoming site host at that shelter in the mid 1990s, the old man had hiked the Appalachian Trail twice, although when I asked about some of the details of his hike he quickly changed the subject, leading me to question the authenticity of his claims.

Finally, after enough prodding I engaged and asked, “So this place is run by the National Park Service?”

“Yep.”

“So you’re overseen by the Department of the Interior, right?”

To this he shrugged his shoulders and said he didn’t know, which seemed odd to me considering that he had just spent so much time bitching and moaning about the government taking away his job next year and his losing his subsidized housing.

“I think it is,” I continued. “If this is run by the Park Service, then it must be the Department of Interior.”

Again, the old man shrugged.

“And forgive me for pushing you on this, but I don’t think that makes Donald Trump your landlord. Donald Trump doesn’t own the National Parks. He may have a lot of power over NPS funding, but he doesn’t ‘own’ the parks themselves. The parks belong to the American people. That’s your landlord. It’s not Donald Trump.”

Immediately it became clear that in the 30+ years that this guy had probably been sitting in that exact same bench, bitching and moaning the exact same complaints that he was today, that he’d rarely been challenged on his perspectives. He had so much to say while I was trying to write, but the moment that I turned the conversation into questioning his claims, he got quiet.

When I asked him what kind of work he did before this, he shrugged. When I asked what skillsets he has that might be employable he literally said, “I don’t want to talk about it.” In short, he was grumpy and full of complaints.

Two years ago I wouldn’t have understood the old man. Two years ago I was still living under the illusion that some stories are perfect and have happy endings. Before I knew that everything in the world is more complicated than we’ll ever even understand.

I was 11 days from my wedding when my fiance “had a spiritual awakening” that led her to change her mind about getting married. The following 18 months were a spiral into the ground for me. And I remember saying during that spiral, that I understood now how bitter old men are made. First, give a man more happiness than he could have even believed was possible. Then, take it away from him in the moments before it’s in his hands. Finally, watch as he unwravels into a bitter old man.

I saw then that I could have let that event turn me into a bitter old man, but I wasn’t ready to surrender to it yet. Instead, I pulled up my britches, put on my big-boy boots, and continued on with trying to make something of my life.

It got dark there for some time in that chapter. I’ve said before in these journals that it nearly killed me. I’m glad today that it didn’t and that I made it to the AT instead. So far this has turned out better than the alternative, I suppose.

But as I sat there listening to the bitter old man who caretakers the Eckville Shelter, it reminded me that men like him aren’t born that way; they’re made that way from experiences that life brings them and the choices they make in reaction to those experiences.

I could have become a bitter old man too. Shit… maybe it’s too early to make that call and I still will… But for now I’d like to believe that I’ve avoided it… at least in this chapter of my life. I may still be bitter sometimes. But at least I’m not a bitter f*cking bellend.

Maybe, I thought, if they do end up closing his shelter down, then he should got out for a third hike of the AT. He seemed like he was overdue.

—

Last night I camped at the same shelter as Stranger, although I set up my tent and he stayed in the shelter with another hiker. I remembered him saying something about rain in the overnight forecast, so I purposefully left my earplugs out when I fell asleep. But how long the rain had been falling before it woke me, I do not know. Mostly it seemed that I was able to get the vestibule zipped up before anything became too wet. I would have zipped it up when I went yo sleep, but left it open to get some fresh air. It’s been so hot. Even at night now, it’s so hot!

I had been so tired as I set camp that I almost stumbled into the tent and onto my pad before dozing off. I almost forgot to zip the door, but after that night with the mouse running across my face, I’ve been much better about that part.

The rain started falling around midnight and fell heavy for almost an hour. I’m used to the sound of rain in my tent by now though. If anything, it’s soothing. And I fell asleep listening to it.

The next thing that woke me was an urge to piss. I almost always have to get up at night to piss–a proposition that’s not overtly daunting in the comfort of your home, but becomes significantly more challenging on a thru hike. Not unmanagably challenging, per se. But at least inconvenient.

I laid there for a few minutes, trying to ignore the discomfort in my bladder, and hoping that I could just fall back asleep.

That never works though.

It kept on, until I had to surrender and accept that it was that time of the night.

Before getting out of my tent, I thought to myself just how hard this experience of thru hiking is sometimes. I think that I get caught up in writing about a lot of the emotional/spiritual/social aspects of my hike, and I fail to highlight the parts that absolutely f*cking suck.

Maybe it’s that there are enough people out there with the complaints. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to be like the bitter old man who runs the Eckville Shelter. Maybe it’s something else that I’m too lost in the experience of the hike to be able to recognize.

But at least for a moment last night, I let myself soak in it, while I attempted to keep myself from soaking the tent in piss. That discomfort still growing.

I thought about how horrible my feet felt at the end of yesterday, having been soaked in water form the trail all day long. It seems like they’d been wet for a week. And the fog… how the fog made everything feel like it was more encompassing and haunting. I thought about how hot the temperatures had been yesterday, in spite of the fact that it was raining. How I hate being sticky and wet while I’m hiking. How I’ve been sticky and wet for so much of the trail, and how I’d be sticky and wet for so long to come still. I thought about how I can see the muscle in my upper body reducing–in spite of working every day so hard to fight through the trail, having to acknowledge that a lot of my upper body muscle is melting to the trail. I still have my daily pushups, but they can only do so much. I thought about the folliculitis that causes my legs to break out. The chaffing on my ass when it’s hot and humid. I thought about how uncomfortable, even the most comfortable of inflatable sleeping pads is. I thought about how wet my tent was now, and how it was beginning to smell like mildew.

I thought about how I still needed to get up and piss.

So I unzipped my tent, fumbled out onto my “door mat” pad, stood up, relieved myself into the forest, and took several deep breaths while I listened to piss splattering on rock. I thought to myself–sometimes this is really f*cking hard. I still love it, but sometimes it’s really f*cking hard man. Really f*cking hard.

I crawled back into my tent, zipped the door, and thought about how the alternative to all this hardship on trail was to just give up and become a bitter old man. But if those are my options, I’d rather be out here. Because I bet it’s a lot harder still to become a bitter old man than it is to attempt to take control of your life and do something as difficult as this. Laying in front of train tracks would have been easier, to be sure. But at no point have I thought that would have been the better choice for me than coming out here. This feels like where I’m supposed to be.

—

Last night my battery bank lost all of its charge, which is a modestly big problem. I should have had 4 full phone charges left on it, but the way that I accidentally hooked my watch to it last night drained the battery bank completely. It’s the second time this has happened on trail, and both times have been tremendously frusterating. It only happens when I forget to take my watch off the charger before going to sleep, which is normally not a problem. But on nights like last night, I’m sometimes too tired to remember to do it and I end up falling asleep while it’s still connected. I think what happens is that the watch keeps turning on and off after it gets fully charged, and somehow that causes the battery bank to keep feeding it power. In turn, the bank goes dead, trying to charge my already charged watch.

I share all this because it changed my plan for the day. I stopped at mile 5 to do my pushups, and when I went to check my phone battery, I realized the discharged battery bank. It meant that I was going to have to detour to the next town to recharge.

The next town was Palmerton, PA, and that’s where I’m writing my journals now.

Before getting here however, the trail jumped and dodged around rocks and boulders, as it’s so known to do in the Pennsylvania AT. It’s an amazingly frusterating task at times. Particularly after the rain from last night, the rocks and boulders all range from slightly slick to slick-as-sh*t. It’s like boulder hopping at a shoreline on low tide. I think that I mentioned a few days ago that it’s led me to fall more than a couple of times in the preceding week.

But as I stumbled rock to rock today, never seeming to actually catch my balance, I noticed the rattlesnake just as my foot touched down about 12 inches from it. It never even rattled at me, but I recognized it from the shape of the head. A small snake–maybe 3 and a half feet long at most. But still enough to nearly scare the piss out of me.

It was the first day in a week that we’ve seen blue sky. I was warned before entering PA–it’s either slippery wet rocks, or it’s rattlesnakes sunning themselves on those rocks. Today it got to be a little of both.

About an hour after the snake, I sat trailside to have a smoke, snack, and pushups, when Plinko came by. We’d been leapfrogging several times through the day. “Dude,” he exclaimed. “I just had a near-death experience!”

“Did you see the rattlesnake too?” I asked.

“No, no snakes. I just almost took a fall on the rocks back there. I cannot believe that there aren’t bones of all the hikers who have died on this stretch of trail before us! Nice of the Forest Service to clean that up for us.”

He wasn’t wrong. There were a few places this past week where if you fell it would have been bad bad bad. Not in a fall-off-a-cliff sort of bad, but a fall-all-over-sharp-jagged-rocks kind of bad.

We’ve both been fortunate to have survived this far.

Maybe two or three days of PA remain.

Plinko and I hiked into Palmerton together, neither of us planning to stay the night, but here we are. We got showers at the local gym, got a few supplies at the grocery store, and now we’ve been working on social media stuff while I’ve been writing at a local ice cream joint. Actually, it’s not all that local. The sign out front says “Spillane’s Creamery,” but when you ask up front, they tell you that all the ice cream is from Hershey. That’s the case with most of the ice cream places around here. We’re just so close to Hershey, PA, and they seem to supply the ice cream to all the shops in these parts.

We weren’t going to stay in town, but it’s been raining since we’ve been here, so we’re likely to set camp in the yard of a local trail angel. Plinko already checked in to see that it was okay. Tomorrow is forecast to be even hotter still. In the 90s. It’s going to be brutal. National Weather Service advises avoiding extended time outside the upcoming four days… not sure how I’m going to pull that off. So Plinko and I are planning to wake at 4am tomorrow and get to trail at 4:30.

Hopefully I sleep a bit better tonight.

Wormwood.

Out.