“Confrontations & Conversations”

AT Day 94; LT Day 7

Miles Today: 11.4

AT Mile: 1710.2 ; LT Mile 105

(Yellow Deli Hiker Hostel; Rutland, VT)

I got a bad feeling about Cobra yesterday, when we met him at the Stonethrow Farmstead in the mid afternoon. We’d been in the heat all day without any reprieve, and had set Stonethrow to be our resting spot for the day, as the maps we follow listed the place as having ice cream, cheeses, bread, and a few other goods. Not to mention, it also provided shade, and the heat yesterday was horrendous.

Plinko remarked that he thought he remembered meeting the guy as we walked up, but said he was mistaken as we got closer and could see the guy a bit more clearly. We hadn’t met him before.

And we’d quickly learn that we wouldn’t really get the chance to meet him this time either.

As we walked over, the hiker introduced himself as Cobra, and there were question marks all over him. Not that he asked a bunch of questions, but that there was a bunch of stuff that didn’t add up about him.

I mentioned it to Plinko when he left. I told Plinko what I wrote above, that he had a lot of question marks around him.

“What do you mean?” Plinko asked.

That caught me off guard. I thought that Plinko would have sensed it too. He’s a pretty good sense of character from what I’ve been able to tell, but he didn’t pick anything up from Cobra, and that led me to wonder if maybe I read too much into him.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I was wrong. But it seemed weird that he says he’s doing the same thing we are (AT and LT), but then he just bolted out of here when we arrived. Seemed like he would have wanted to hang and talk. That, and the first thing he said about his last attempt at a Long Trail hike was a bunch of excuses for why he couldn’t finish it.” I hesitated, because I felt like maybe I’d judged too deeply and read into something that wasn’t there. “I don’t know man… he just seemed sketchy to me. Maybe I read him wrong.”

…

This morning we realized that we had not read him wrong.

It was unfortunate that he had camped at the same site as we had. We didn’t see him last night, but this morning I woke up and it started raining as we were breaking down camp. So I threw everything into my pack as quickly as I could, and then brought it over to the shelter to finish my coffee and pack more properly.

When I arrived at the shelter, Cobra was already there, chatting it up with a girl who was hiking with her dog. The shelter had a big long roof and went way deep back into the space where the bunks were, so it was dark when I got in there and hard to make out detail from the lack of light. And it was raining, so very little light made it back there. As I sat and made pleasant small talk with the gal, I asked the guy’s name who was sitting there, and he turned to me.

“Dude, I already met you yesterday,” he said, and he turned with a discouraged look on his face.

That’s when I realized it was Cobra again. Right from the get go I had a bad feeling about him. But I tried to be pleasant and join into the conversation. Quickly it became clear that wasn’t going to go well though.

Cobra was going on and on about how experienced he was and delving out all his great knowledge of the trail, which seemed weird, since when I asked him about his trails yestrday he just said that he’d attempted a Long Trail hike a few years ago but got flooded out by rain.

The gal with the dog was having some concerns about the upcoming climb, but instead of offering any practical advice, Cobra just told her that “you’ll probably be fine.” Which I thought was a dickhead thing to say, so I asked more, and he reapeated himself. “She doesn’t need to worry about it. The dog will probably be okay on the rock scramble.”

The asshole was straight up fear mongering. Making it sound like the upcoming miles were somethign to be worried about, and it always gets under my skin when people say stuff like that.

I made comment about needing to go back down to the river to get some water before starting into the climb, and he remarked, “Oh, you’ll be fine.”

I turned to him and said that he doesn’t have a clue how much water I have or how much I normally carry. “You’re either irresponsible or arrogant man. I don’t have as much confidence as you seem to.”

He shrugged, and said something to the effect of “you’ll figure it out.”

It went quiet for a second before I finally said what was on my mind. “Didn’t you tell us yesterday that you’ve never finished a thru hike?”

Cobra turned to me aggressively with scorn in his eyes. “What the fuck are you talking about!? I’ve hiked this trail twice! And the Long Trail I *would* have finished, but I got fucking flooded out by a 100 year flood!”

“Wow…” I hesitated, as I didn’t quite know what to say. “I don’t think you told us that yesterday. I mean… you just said that you got flooded out of the Long Trail, and it seemed like you have a lot of confidence in your hiking…”

He almost cut me off again and said something like, “Yeah, well you should maybe listen better.”

It was about that point where I decided that I was done engaging with the bellend cock wad. But he continued on with more garbage, telling us about how much he loved getting drunk on trail, and how “some of my best days on trail are when I’m hung over. I just love being angry and pissed off to keep me going through the day!”

I told him that I don’t really like alcohol, because it makes me act like and asshole and say stupid things.

“Yeah, well I can handle my alcohol better I guess.”

I told him I don’t have that ability. “Maybe it’s the little bit of Native American in me,” I said.

“Fuck that! I’m Native American and Irish. I know how to handle my liquor.” He said.

I told him that I prefer to use psychedelics these days, and he said that he loves psychedelics, but that he can’t find them on trail, so he sticks to alcohol.

It was about that time that I decided I needed to leave. I looked to Plinko and he said the same thing without saying anything at all. It was just in the way he looked at me.

So I quickly finished packing, threw on my bag, and trudged out of the shelter, neither Plinko nor I saying goodby on our exit. We just left and walked out into the rain.

…

After a quarter mile, I stopped and turned back to Plinko. “There’s a reason that guy’s named after a fucking snake!” I said.

Plinko agreed. “Fuck that guy.”

It was reassuring to know we both felt the same about him.

I went on, “You remember what I said about him yesterday; about him having a lot of question marks around him.”

Plinko agreed. “I see it now too.”

…

I was honestly flustered by it for a long time this morning. I have a deep disdain for people who peddle fear on the trail, people who act like they’re hot shit when they’re not, people who feign away when they meet people with more experience than them, people who make excuses for why they didn’t finish a trail, people who make claims that clearly aren’t true, and generally people who don’t have respect for others.

I was all fired up. I told Plinko that I felt upset that I let it bother me that much, and he told me not to let it get under my skin.

Maybe it caught me more by surprise this morning because I hadn’t seen that kind of asshat in a while. Most of them seem to have dropped out by this point.

But he’d only started into the trail recently; Cobra hadn’t started in Georgia. He’d started a couple weeks back, was claiming to be doing a Long Trail thru hike, and that he was going to do the rest of the AT after he finished the LT.

Since this morning we’ve seen him another three times. I’ve avoided him every time, and he seems to get the message.

…

Later in the morning, we met another hiker who had also been at the shelter last night. His name is Apothecary, and he’s a really good dude.

We chatted him up for a bit, and as I stepped away I told Plinko that it was nice to have a positive interaction with another person after this morning at the shelter. That I had been worrying that I’d just been in a shitty mood during that conversation with Cobra and that I was blowing things out of proportion. Meeting Apothecary was reinforcement that it hadn’t all been in my head after all. That there were still other good people on the trail, and in Cobra had in fact been an asshole.

…

Today will be our last day on the AT before departing onto the Long Trail for 10~12 days. We’ve been warned several times over that the northern half of the Long Trail is a completely different kind of hiking than the miles of the LT we’ve hiked so far. But I think that we are ready for and possibly even excited for it. When I think of it adding miles to my AT hike, I don’t like the idea of hiking the Long Trail. But when I think of the LT as a seperate entity, unto itself, I really like the idea of it. So that’s the way I’ve been trying to look at things~~as if we’re taking a break from the Appalacahin Trail to hike something different for a couple of weeks. I’ve also told Plinko that the roughness of the LT will help prepare us for the White Mountains of New Hampshire, which are reputed to be the hardest miles of the Appalachain Trail. I told him we should be strong by the time we get back to Rutland in a week or two.

~~~

Our ride into Rutland was a blast. Her name was Lael, and she was everything that we got from our last somewhat~wild~lady~driver on the July 4th, but maybe a bit more “together.” As soon as we got into the car she asked if either of us was allergic to peppermint, and proceeded to slather us both with peppermint oil on the neck. I wasn’t sure if it was just to cover up the hiker smell or if there was more to it than that, but I appreciated her for it either way.

She ended up touring us around the town for a bit, and at one point made a sharp detour into what looked like an abandoned lot. I told her that if she was bringing us to a crack house, that I was going to be very upset. I meant it jokingly and hoped she heard it as such, and she did. She ended up driving us to the grocery store for resupply, giving us a run down of the town, dropping us off at the Yellow Deli Hiker Hostel, and most importantly, she shared with me a story about a connection she had with a dying raccoon, several years before.

Earlier today I had met a hiker and offered her a coyote tooth while we sat and had lunch together, but her reaction was what you might expect… which is to say that she was confused why I had a bag of coyote teeth in my fanny pack, and she politely declined. Lael didn’t decline though. When I offered it to her she was at first confused, but as we got to know one another a bit better during the ten or fifteen minutes that she drove us around, it was made very clear to me that she understood and appreciated my gesture. When she got home, she messaged me a photo of her alter at home and the coyote tooth atop a piece of amythesit.

It’s moments like these that I’m hiking the Appalachian Trail for.

…

I should mention~~my hyphen and dash key are no longer working as of today. I also have issues with the question mark/slash key; that still works, but it’s wonky. It might be time for a new keyboard. Lord knows I’ve got some miles out of this one though.

…

Last thing before I go to bed… it’s become so late~~two days ago I got a text from Hemlock. It was a picture from his kitchen table of the letter, mailed from Waco, Texas. My feather had arrived! Why it took the better part of an entire month to get there is absolutely beyond me, but it’s arrived no less. He told me that he’s going to send it to Rutland so that I can get it when I come back through on my way back to the Appalachian Trail, but even that scares me a bit. That thing’s been lost and misplaced so many times on this trail that it scares me to think about mailing it again. But I also don’t know how else to get it back to me, so we’re going to give it a go.

As always, I’m growing very tired as I write this and need to bring it to a close, even if I didn’t get everything onto the page that I wanted to. That’s always the case. I maybe get 10% of what I really wish I was capturing.

But we do what we can and try not to get too lost in the things that we can’t.

We’re planning 3 days to get to our next resupply town of the Long Trail. It’s only around 65 miles, but the miles are supposed to be rugged and have a lot of climbing, so we’re trying to not be too confident in ourselves and assume that we’ll be able to hold the same miles on this section of the trail that we had on the last 1700 miles of the AT.

~~~

I had an idea today that, over the course of the enter Long Trail, I want to try and eat a pint of every flavor of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.

I proposed this to Plinko today, and he quickly looked up that there are a total of 98 flavors. I’ve had 3 pints in Vermont so far… so if I have 6~10 pints a day for the rest of the trail, I’ll make my goal. Fat chance…

So instead I’ll just have a different flavor in every trail town. That feels decidant enough without being gratuitous.

~~~

Half day tomorrow, as we still have some town chores to get done. Then back to trail. We split from the AT in 1 mile.

Wormwood.