“Down”

AT Day 119

Miles Today: 7.56

AT Mile: 1900.0

(The Barn Hostel; Gorham, NH)

Down down down.

Down down down down down.

Down down.

Down down down down down down down down down.

Down.

Down down down down down.

Flat.

Down down.

Down down down down.

Down.

Down down down.

Are you getting tired of it yet? Be honest. Have we approached the point where it’s about all you can take and you feel like all we’re going to do in this journal is repeat that word over and over again?

Well then we might be approaching the point.

Today was a lot of downhill hiking.

A lot a lot.

It was enough downhill that all I could think about with every step was just that: down down down down down. It felt like it would never end.

I thought to myself several times that it would be strange that I’d be bothered with all this downhill hiking after all the hundreds or thousands of miles that I’ve put into descending the Grand Canyon. But this is a different kind of downhill. When you’re fully enveloped in the forest and can’t see more than ten or fifteen feet through the foliage it feels like you’re going downhill without actually going anywhere at all. It doesn’t change. It’s just more down down down down down.

At least descending the Grand Canyon or the alpine mountains from the last few days there is a view to take in and some change along the way as you go down. Today it was just down and then more down. After that, you guessed it, more down.

You might be thinking to yourself as you read this–Isn’t all that downhill better than just as much uphill. And honestly, I don’t know that it is. Either way it’s challenging. The grade of the AT is unlike any of the other long distance hiking trails that I’ve walked (the Long Trail possibly standing as an exception). And so on the uphill it’s sometimes so steep that you have to use your hands to scramble up over roots and boulders. But then on the downhill it’s so steep that it hurts the knees and it feels like lowering yourself down a mountain, one bolder at a time… actually, that is exactly what it is.

The climbs and descents have become so much over the last hundred miles that I no longer follow the distance or GPS tracking on my Garmin watch. Instead, I watch the elevation profile as I climb up or descend down. Because I swear to god, if I watch the distance, I can spend an entire hour without crossing a whole mile sometimes! It’s incredibly discouraging. So the solution that I’ve found when there are big climbs or descents is to check what the top and bottom elevations are, then set my watch to display current elevation, and track the change, 100ft at a time.

—

All this is to say that the last 75 miles of the White Mountains have completely changed my expectation of milage. I remember being at Hikers Hostel last week and thinking that it’s “only 75 miles” to get to Gorham, which basically represents the end of New Hampshire. I even asked one of the staff at the hostel if I was resting the maps correctly. They said yes, but gave me that raised eyebrow look that indicated that I was missing something. That something that I was missing was how aggressive the climbs and descents of the White Mountains would be. I know I’d been warned about it since before even starting the AT in Georgia. But to be warned is a very different thing than to have those climbs and those miles underfoot.

Throughout every day on trail I’ll take little voice memos, to remind myself things to write about at the end of the day.

One of my notes for today just says “The climbs and descents are fucking brutal.”

Seri always reads the reminders back to me after I’ve added them to my list, and it was funny to hear her curse, adding emphasis to the description of agony.

—

This morning I was sipping coffee on the front deck of the shelter that I shared with three other thru hikers last night. Technically I was supposed to be doing that at the “Cooking Area” which was about 25 yards away, but I was feeling rebellious this morning and decided to boil my water on the porch. I even told the other hikers that they could report me to the Appalachain Mountain Club if they felt the need. They told me they’d get right on that and I watched one of the others light his stove on the porch as well.

Just as I was taking my first sip of coffee (yes I’m transitioning to tea, but I still go back and forth between that and coffee, so lay off!) the site host walked up and greeted us with a chipper “good morning.”

Right away and like a knee-jerk reflex, I said “Good morning Zoe.” Even as the words rolled off my tongue, I realized that wasn’t her name though, and I corrected myself immediately. “Neo. Not Zoe. Neo. Not sure where I got Zoe from.”

She looked at me kind of funny, but she’s also used to working with foggy-headed hikers, so it wasn’t an overly surprised look. More of a look to acknowledge the slip of the tongue.

“I don’t even know where Zoe came from,” I said, trying to explain it more to myself than to her. I didn’t feel bad for having called her by the wrong name; I was more curious as to where it came from.

Then it hit me.

“Oh! I know what it was.” I said. “It’s all the same letters,” I explained. “The Z is just an N on its side, and the O and the E are in both names. So I just saw the N sideways and filled in the rest. Sideways Z-O-E instead of NEO.”

She looked at me sort of strange again, maybe even more strangely this time than before. And I noticed that the other three hikers were also listening in as well. One of them said, “Wormowood, I like how your brain works.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ve taken a lot of psychedelics.”

I honestly don’t know how much of it is nature and how much of it is nurture. I don’t know if I would have ended up like I am today were it not for the chance encounter with a mushroom in 2012. I don’t know how much of it comes from those first 50 days of the AT. I don’t know how much of it is a product of being raised by the family that raised me. I don’t know how much of it comes from the books I’ve read and the musings that I’ve written. I don’t know how much of it comes from having studied writing and literature.

I don’t know why I am the way I am.

But I do believe that psychedelics had a lot to do with it. That’s what I choose to believe.

The all of us talked some more, and I’d just like to say that I very much enjoyed the conversations that I’ve had with the site hosts of the White Mountain shelters and campsites. Neo was a really cool person, and I meant every bit of it when I told her that I hope that our paths cross again.

I honestly hope that they do.

—

I went swimming in a river today, and I bathed in a river two days ago as well. I had written about swimming in a lake during the White Mountain stretch and got a message from Boots telling me that I should take those opportunities to swim more often. As silly as a reminder like that might sound, it still stuck with me. And in both instances–today and two days ago–I paused, thought about the time and hassle it takes to go swimming on trail, and the thought of how cold that water was going to be–but ultimately it was her voice in the back of my head that pushed me over the edge.

The river waters around here are so clear that it’s remarkable, especially after seeing the nasty water that some of the mid Atlantic states had. That brown tannic water seems to mostly be a thing of the past. At least I hope it is.

—

Only eight miles today into Gorham, New Hampshire. This is my last trail town of the state, and tomorrow I’ll likely cross into Maine–my last state of the Appalachian Trail!

Tonight I’m staying at the Barn Hostel. It’s supposedly the oldest hiker hostel in the state, and it looks that way. It has a lot of good character, and the owner is nice, but it also feels dingy. Not like the dungeon, but still, it feels a bit stuffy in here.

I got my new-new keyboard, and my last new pair of shoes. The new keyboard is much smaller than the one that I’ve been working with for the last hundred miles, and although it takes some time for my fingers to get used to this key spacing, it saves 100 grams compared to the other.

Lots more that I could write about… but that’s always the gig. One small note that I want to take just for when I’m looking back and working this into a book: the hiker who called himself “Nazi” and his son “Warrier” are both her at this hostel today. More that I could stay about it, but nothing important for the time being. Unless I want to explore it more later on, the main thing that I want to note is that the guy obviously cares about his son. I can see a longing for him to connect more deeply. And for that matter, I see that same longing from the son. Maybe the take away point of it is that we are complex people. Rarely is someone just purely evil or just purely good. We are amalgamations of complicated things. We are both angel and demon, and maybe part of the challenge of this life is to identify the parts in ourself that we see as good and do what we can to bring those good pieces out of us even more fully.

Or maybe I’m just being too heady.

Maybe it’s from the psychedelics.

Wormwood.