“100 Days”

AT Day 100; LT Day 13

Miles Today: 21.96

LT Mile:

(Butler Lodge [shelter])

They must have been Bluebead Lillies that she had confused for blueberries yesterday before arriving at camp and promptly vomiting. Out here it’s impossible to hear mention of someone throwing up without having thoughts of Norovirus come to mind like flashbacks of Vietnam. But then right after she’d finished barfing she said that it must have been from the blueberries that she’d foraged earlier in the day.

I asked Plinko this morning if he’s seen any blueberries in the last 100 miles, and we both agreed that we have not. There are blue berries on trail but they’re not blueberries. This isn’t blueberry season.

I only heard her from inside my tent last night as I was trying to write, but she cursed like a sailor and hated everything about the Long Trail. She also did a commendable job of keeping Plinko and I awake while she listed off her list of woes from the terrible 8-mile day that she’d just completed. I’d reiterate them here for you, but I do enough complaining about the challenges of the trail to satisfy most readers on that front, so there’s no need to list all of hers. But the point is that she came into camp way past dark, promptly barfed, and proceeded to loudly talk shit on the LT for the rest of the night. I wish it could have been in a day where I could find sympathy for her, but like I wrote last night–it had been on the best day that Plinko and I had had on trail for a while.

—

I woke up this morning and made no effort to keep quiet for our neighbor. In fact, the moment I remembered that today is my hundredth day, I decided to light a joint at camp and enjoy it with coffee as my breakfast. I rarely smoke flower or joints, but I had a couple of them that I’d purchased in town for special occasions. Today seemed like just such an occasion. And heaven forbid if my weed smoke wafted over to my loud-mouth neighbor’s tent.

I normally don’t behave like that.

I’d like to believe that she doesn’t either.

But it’s unlikely that either of us will ever know, as I don’t expect that our paths are to cross again.

—

My body is sore today in ways that it has not been this entire summer. My glutes and hamstrings are more sore than I remember them being in years–yet another testament to the difficulty of the Long Trail. I haven’t event felt this beat up by the Grand Canyon in years!

I’ve been trying to compensate by eating a lot of protein, but I just don’t know if my body is going to have time to adjust to the demands of this trail before it’s done and we’re at the Canadian border in a few days.

It’ll probably be 5 more full days from here.

I am also losing feeling in one of my toes. It’s the fourth toe on my right foot. I’ve had issues with that toe before, around 6 years ago while I was on the CDT. It was diagnosed as a neroma, and I had a cortisone shot there in 2019. But it hadn’t been an issue since then.

In 2019 it was extreme pain and then the toe went numb. This time around it seems that it skipped step one and went directly to numbness.

Plinko diagnosed it as “Christmas Toe.”

I told him I’d never heard of it, but he said a lot of thru hikers get it.

“Is it sort of tingly and numb?” He asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“And the second to last toe you said?”

“Yep.”

“Definitely Christmas Toe. You should start to get feeling back around Christmas.”

—

This morning I took a gram and a half of mushrooms in commemoration of my 100th day on trail. And they kicked me in the soul! It had been maybe a week or two since I’d had any psychedelic, and my tolerance has clearly reset! Fortunately the miles this morning were mostly downhill and included a very rare road walk for several miles. By the time I started into today’s big climb the peak of the mushrooms had mostly worn off and I was left glowey and thoughtful for the remainder of the day.

Strange how they affected me today. Almost nothing visual whatsoever, but a very powerful mental effect that lasted for a long time.

It was positively delightful.

—

While I was on mushrooms I listened to two very powerful things.

For some time I listened to music and let my phone pick songs at random. A song played by a band called Modest Mouse and it moved me so heavily that I had to play it over and over again until I was in tears.

The song had been significant to me since the day I left my home town of Valdez, Alaska to start college. I remember it playing while I drove away from the place I’d called home up to that point and out to Anchorage.

It’s called “Bankrupt on Selling” and as I listened to it over and over today it made me feel like the story that I’ve been trying to write about my life has already been written, and it is every lyric of that song.

I have to believe we’ve all felt that way at some point before.

I’ve literally felt it once before on this trail–with another song that I have since played over again more times than I can remember. I never told you the name of that song. It was Tool’s “Push It.”

Bankrupt on Selling:

“Well I’ll go to college and I’ll learn some big words; and I’ll talk real loud; goddam right I’ll be heard; and you’ll remember that guy who said all those big words he must have learned in college…”

—

I then listened to the entirety of Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” on audiobook.

It’s a book I’ve read and listened to dozens of times over. This is my second time in the last six months, but my first time on the AT.

It’s a text I listen to at least once through on every thru hike. Every time I pick up on something new in it. This time may have been my first time listening to it all through while under the influence of mushrooms.

The scene with the sharks struck me heavily this time… pun not intended.

The old man’s feeling of regret for ever having killed the fish, which is his brother once he realizes that it’ll all be lost to the sharks.

I’ve had that feeling before too. Recently. In the last two years.

Listening today made me think of the greatest thing I have ever captured and lost, and what that did to me. I found myself relating to the old man at the end of the book in ways that I have not before. Thinking that I shouldn’t have gone so far out to sea, and regretting returning with that which I caught.

It was profound.

I cried.

—

Tomorrow we’ll summit the highest point of the Long Trail–Mount Mansfield. From there we descend into the Stowe ski resort where Alaska’s car is parked. We’ll have a short day tomorrow but the miles we do have will be aggressive.

This is the Long Trail for you. It does not fuck around.

Wormwood.