“At the Surfaces of Deep Waters”

AT Day 93; LT Day 6

Miles Today: 29.83

AT Mile: 1698.7; LT Mile 93

(Governor Clement Shelter [tent])

I must have slept fairly well last night, as I failed to wake up to the sound of mice chewing up the rim of my Jet Boil at around 3am. I know it was around then because Plinko said he thought he heard me messing with the lid of my cold soak jar at that time. But I was doing no such thing. That was the work of mice.

I’m fortunate that they havent been a bigger issue on trail so far… except that one night where I had one run across my face while I was trying to sleep.

—

The spider webs made it difficult to maintain my composure this morning. We were to trail early, a couple of hours before sunrise, and first to trail out here has to deal with the webs. They were so troublesome that I ended up putting my buff around my face, so that I at least didnt have to keep pulling them out from my beard as I hiked.

—

Very tired as I write this tonight, so going to have to keep things brief.

—

We did not end up breaking 30 miles, but we’re close enough that it’s almost worth rounding. I told Plinko that I could walk around in circles for a minute or two and it would bring me to 30, but at the same time, I barely care. Those were the worries for the beginning of the trail. I don’t lose myself in them so easily anymore.

The heat and humidity today have been intense! My clothes have been completely soaked through to a point that I’m constantly dripping sweat from my elbows and my knuckles. The flies were also terrible this afternoon, just as the heat was at a peak, and it was difficult to tell the difference between a deer fly landing on you and a bead of sweat running down your arm. As a result, you’re swatting at flies and sweat beads as they form all over your body.

The number of times that I slapped myself in the head today because of those fucking flies landing on me though… it was really getting to me.

Temperatures broke 90 degrees F, and with the humidity that likely put the heat index a bit over triple digits.

—

Extremely tired.

Can barely keep my eyes open.

—

Met a hiker named… well, let’s call him Burger, so I don’t give away his identity.

We talked for some time. He’s also finishing a triple crown. He started his NOBO AT hike on April 20th, but caught norovirus twice in a month and decided he didn’t want to hike with the crowd anymore. So he flipped up to the northern end and is hiking south.

We’re going to see one another when he picks up the AZT in Flagsaff this fall.

I offered him a coyote tooth and a half gram of mushrooms. He took both with gratitude.

—

Swam in a lake today.

Swam way out into it.

The waters were deep, but I didn’t realize it until I was swimming back in.

I swam out, maybe a quarter way across and turned over onto my back to float there and look up at the clouds. The sun broke through and the direct light was pleasant in its warmth.

Out there, far from the shore, I wondered how deep the waters must be underneath me.

I had the thought that if anything happened, I’d sink to the bottom and nobody would be there to save me. Plinko was at the shoreline and he knows how to swim, but he doesn’t like to. And anyway, I was too far out for him to be able to do anything if something did go wrong.

Not that I thought it would, but the thought sat with me there.

Only after swimming back to shore did I get to see that the lake actually dropped off aggressively, about ten or fifteen feet past the shoreline. You couldn’t see that from the shore though. From the shore it looked like a gradual and slow drop, like most of the other lakes I’ve swam in on the AT. But this one dropped right off into darkness, just out of eyeshot from the shoreline.

It sort of freaked me out, thinking I’d been swimming out there, who knows how deep the water was that far out.

It seems strange that there would be any good in a feeling like that. That there would be any reason that we should feel drawn to situations like that, but somehow that’s how I found myself. It was almost like an erotic allure.

Terrance McKenna once commented on the closeness of eros and death in one of his lectures that I listened to on the Psychedelic Saloon podcast during my AT hike. Maybe it’s something like that. Maybe the allure of being hanging there, swimming in deep-deep water that could swallow me if I lost my focus is the same thing that draws me to trails like this to begin with–to go far out and deep into something that has the power to eat me, but trusting that instead of being eaten, to trust that I’ll float above it. And that there will be some good to come from taking risks and swimming into deep water. Believing that the sun will warm my skin once I’m out there, that the water will leave me reborn, and that the miles ahead will be better because of it.

Hopefully I’m not being too deep… pun intended.

—

We are camped beside a river tonight.

Almost thirty miles today. Point two miles short. Close enough to round up if I wanted.

Tomorrow we have a massive climb in the morning and about 10 miles to the road crossing that will lead us to the town of Rutland.

Actively falling asleep.

Wormwood.