“Some Say the World Will End in Fire”

AT Day 122

Miles Today: 12.59

AT Mile: 1946.0

(Wyman Mountain [tent])

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

“Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost

It’s extremely hot and humid again today. I cannot manage to get over the heat. There have been miles on other trails where the heat has been bad, but nothing as bad as the heat of this trail. It’s been the defining characteristic of the Appalachian Trail. And I feel like I’m just being a whiney little bitch every time I write out my woes about the heat, but it’s hard to think about much else within the midst of it.

The heat started to get bad in Virginia. Somewhere around mile 500 of this trail. It’s been off and on terrible since then. Or call it what I called it yesterday–worse than awful.

Today the temperatures are hotter than they were yesterday. The next two days will be hotter than today. It’ll be in the 90s, and that’s before adding heat index from the impact of humidity.

It’s ridiculous. This is the northern-most state of the entire trail. We are in f*cking Maine! Go north of here and you have Canada. And what’s going on in Canada right now? You guessed it–wildfires.

This world is burning down, man.

I don’t know how far we are from the end of the world, but it seems to be burning down before us. I hope I’m just being melodramatic but sometimes it feels like we’re past the Tipping Point and the best thing I can do is be grateful that I caught some of these trails in their last moments of life before the world all burned down.

It’s the heat that makes me think all apocalyptically like this though. I’m not all set on the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it when it’s not so hot that I’m soaked through all my clothing from days start to sundown.

—

I’ve also been incredibly lonely in the last week or so. I meet other AT hikers from time to time, mostly others who I met earlier in the trail. But nobody I know as a friend or close companion.

Much of this trail has been lonely.

It’s been one of the conflicts that I knew I was going to have to deal with along this walk, but I didn’t know what the manifestation of loneliness would look like until getting my feet into the dirt and onto the trail.

Now I understand it better because I’m often in it. Now I understand it to be the same thing that hurt so bad back home and before the trail. Now I understand that like a lot of the demons I meet out on this trail, the loneliness is another one of those things that is probably more in me than a product of my outside surroundings.

It makes me feel like something about me is broken. That people are not supposed to feel this way. But as far back as I can remember, I’ve spent most of my life feeling this way.

I hate how dependent I feel for the company of others. I hate how fulfilled it makes me to feel loved by another. I hate how little i feel like I can get through this life on my own.

I hate this feeling of being so alone.

In the heat and alone…

—-

I had a few options with where my day was going today, but it played out somehow somewhat unexpectedly.

I slept in, which was nice, but also meant that I missed the cooler hours of the day. But my lose plan had been to take a ride into the town of Andover, Maine and likely stay in a hostel. I camped at the same shelter as OldSchool last night, and that was his plan; he already had reservations at the hostel and a shuttle ride arranged to pick him up at the road crossing. He said I could tag along on the shuttle ride if I needed.

The climb this morning was nice by comparison with other climbs I’ve bitched and moaned about in the preceding week. This mountain peak was mostly open and free of vegitation and it felt like some of the big mountain slopes of Montana. The open mountain face also meant a breeze continued over the ridge line until the trail inevitably dropped back below the alpine line and into the thick of the forest again.

Although it was aggressively hot this morning, I had in the back of my head that I was only going to be covering 8 miles, then the hitch into Andover, and that made hiking and being soaked through with sweat almost more tolerable.

I got to the road about an hour before OldSchool and proceeded to try and hitch into town, but only three vehicles came by in that time, one of them being a four wheeler that already carried two occupants. I brought my thumb down when I saw them come around the bend up the road–one because I didn’t think they had room for a third, and two because I especially didn’t want to ride in with them if they felt otherwise.

Eventually OldSchool arrived and within a minute of his arrival, a car pulled up and asked if he was the one who had hailed for a shuttle.

She gave us a ride the seven miles to Andover and shared that this was only her second time shuttling hikers and that she was 19 years old. Based on her driving I do not expect her to make it past 20 years old or 5 hike shuttle without putting her goddam car in a ditch.

At one point she offered me her THC vape pen as she drove down the winding road and I sat mostly quiet in the back seat, scared into submission by her driving skills. I declined and told her that I had my own, and gestured to my pocket.

“Oh!” She said. “Then you don’t mind if I hit mine while I drive.”

Fortunately, after surviving the last 1950 miles of the Appalachian Trail and all the dangers along the way, I’ve also made it through the 7 mile drive to Andover with Lindsey, the 19-year-old Kamakazi shuttle driver.

—

Resupply in Andover was less than great, but it’ll be enough to get me to the next trail town 36 miles up from here. Thirty-six miles used to be something that I’d plan to cover in a day and a half when I was in the southern AT, but up here it’s more like two and a half days! I’ve said it before, and I’m sure that I’ll say it again–the miles of New Hampshire and what I’ve seen of Maine have been extremely slow and arduous!

Today might have had a couple of cruisey miles compared to the cliffs that have become normal to the trail, but it still is a battle to get up trail anymore.

I’ve had this thought several times in the last week, that the last third of the Appalachian Trail has felt like it’s been three quarters of the hike. The end of the trail seems to stretch out farther and farther off into the distance, like a lens-shift in an Alfred Hitchcock film.

Am I reaching too far for the simile?

The point is that the northern end of this trail has been extremely slow and difficult, and this leads to the perception that it’s gone on for some strange forever.

I scanned my digital maps this afternoon to look at the trail towns and miles ahead still, and it was an eye opening experience. Even though I’m well into the final state of the AT, there are still a lot of long miles to go. And when I think about how painful and long these miles are, and how few I can collect in the span of a day, it makes me want to give up.

I have never had the realistic thought of quitting the trail since the start, but if this were not my Triple Crown trail, I have to wonder if I would be so commited to continuing. I can say for sure that the fun is gone now and I’m just walking to get to the end. There have been worse moments of the trail, but this hasn’t been fun for me in the ways that I like a trail to be for some time. I look forward to this hike being over so that I can go on to what’s next, be that hiking related or otherwise.

—

I spent a couple of hours in that general store in Andover, eating lunch, charging electronics, and waiting out the heat of the day to the extent that I could.

I ate two pints of ice cream but was disappointed to find that they didn’t have any Ben & Jerry’s. Yes, I am hooked on the stuff. Do you have some kind of problem with that? Do you?

Got a ride back to trail pretty quickly and put in another 4.5 miles of mostly up hill. The trail has been hot and dry lately with no rain since I entered the White Mountains. Accordingly, water sources are either low, stagnant, or dry. I had to carry water up to where I’m camping because of that. The site is next to a dry river bed, but I needed water for camp, and I didn’t want to be stingy. I carried quite a lot so that I could also get something akin to a sponge bath after how much I’ve sweat today. It’s very gross.

—

Accidents threw out my gallon trash bag in Andover this afternoon. It’s such a shame, because that f*cking bag made it all the way from day 5 of the trail! I got it in Hiawassi, Georgia from another thru hiker and somehow it’s made it all this way without the double zip lock giving out.

I’ve been forgetting quite a lot of things like that these last couple of weeks. I think my brain is getting tired.

On that note, it’s becoming late and I want to be to trail a bit earlier tomorrow morning. Might even set an alarm as it’s forecast to break 90 degrees. And with the climbing and terrible condition of the trail on top of it all, I want to get what I can from the morning hours.

Exhausted and somewhat dampened soul, but it’s amazing how much good even a sponge bath can bring at the end of a day like this.

Wormwood.