AT Day 71

Miles Today: 32.19

AT Mile: 1291.0

(Kirkridge Shelter, PA [tent])

“What’s ‘LDH’?” I asked Plinko from across the table. We were sitting at the ice cream shop last night, still waiting to see if the rain was going to let up and checking what other options were available for the evening if it didn’t. Quietly I think we both wanted for it to hold out; we were already spent from the day.

“I don’t know; I was wondering the same. It must be a typo. Maybe it’s supposed to say ‘LDS member’ and not ‘LDH member.’ You know, as in Latter Day Saints.”

We both looked back to the mapping software on our phones called FarOut, rereading the comments from other hikers about Palmerton, PA. Amongst several comments about resupply, restaurants, and ice cream, there was mention of a local trail angel named “Squeak” who let hikers camp at her yard, and that she was “a local LDH member.”

“That must be it,” I agreed. “They must have meant Latter Day Saints and typed it wrong.”

—

We pitched tents in her back yard with one other hiker from Japan, and Plinko and I set alarms for 4am. We were on foot and headed back to trail before a half hour had elapsed.

“I don’t think it was ‘LDS’ after all,” I said, braking the stuffy quiet between us as we staggered down the Palmerton sidewalk before the first indication of dawn.

Plinko let out a burst of laughter and agreed that, no, this lady defiantly wasn’t a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. “What was it that gave it away?” He asked. “The lighting up a cigarette in the kitchen, or was it when she introduced herself with ‘honey–I was born indecent.’?”

“Neither,” I responded. “For me it was her insisting to compare the trails out of palmerton and how they look like a vagina on the map.” Every time she’d describe a part of the trail north of here she’d stick the cigarette in her mouth and hold her hands up into a diamond shape, insisting that it made the firm of a woman’s anatomy.

At one point I told her that it was presumptive amongst an audience of three dudes to assume that using a vagina as a mapping reference was going to provide us with any clarity whatsoever. Isn’t it the great sexual cliche that men can’t find a clitoris in a haystack?

I digress…

My point is ti say that our stay with Squeak was memorable at the least. I realized this morning, in our half-asleep, pre-dawn walk to trail that LDH stands for “Long Distance Hiker,” as she’d told us all about being a member of the American Long Distance Hiking Association and that she’d thru hiked some years back.

The house may have been a mess, and her stories may have bounced all over the place, but I just have to say that Squeak was amazing, and I’m grateful to have met her and her family. It was also helpful to have a place to set camp in town last night.

That said–if I’d been looking for someone who could have a long conversation with me about God and how to get into heaven, I don’t think that Squeak would have been the place to find it.

You’d be better off asking a member of the LDS church, I suppose. Of which I can say Squeak is most certainly not. That said, she’s welcome in my church any time. If there exists such a thing.

Maybe I’d call it the church of LSD if there was.

—

It sort of caught me off guard this morning, an hour or two after sunrise, when Stranger caught up to me again. I thought that he must have been 5-10 miles ahead by now. But this is almost a week where we’ve been hiking sort of in the same general area. Plinko and I tried to convince him to join us into town yesterday afternoon, but he was intent on climbing up that mountain after Palmerton in the heat of the day. And god bless him for it. He does things his way, and ain’t nobody going to convince him otherwise, even when his way is significantly harder than the other available options. If anything I respect him more for it.

But Plinko and I must have passed his camp this morning without realizing it.

The three of us, Plinko, Stranger, and myself, are the closest thing to a trail family that I’ve had on the AT. I keep thinking that we’ll be seperating any time, because I am significantly slower than the other two, but Plinko is slowing his milage in the same way that I have been, and Stranger just keeps setting camp earlier than he has been planning, so that puts him further behind than he’d otherwise be. All this to say, it’s been fun having a loose connection with a couple other hikers for awhile.

—

It has been getting hot these last couple of days. Two days ago it was wet and hot. Yesterday it was mostly humid and hot. But today and for the next three days it’s just going to be hot and hot. I don’t know what this area is like normally, but there are reports about the heat wave moving into this area on the national news broadcasts. Not that I’m keeping up with national news broadcasts, but I’ve got people from all around in other places that are not near the AT who are sending news updates and warnings about the week ahead.

The worst report that I’ve seen has predicted temps at or above 100 degrees on Monday and/or Tuesday. Today’s Friday. It’ll probably be 95-97. With the added humidity, it’s a lot heavier than the heat of Arizona.

It’s the reason that Plinko and I decided to get to trail so early this morning–to put in miles before it gets too hot.

So it’s just after 1:00 in the afternoon now and I’m about 18 miles into the day. I’ve had this plan for hot days, where I’ll get my miles in early, and then spend the mid day resting and writing at a shelter. But I haven’t actually followed through with that game plan until today.

Like I said though–today’s too hot to f*ck around with. And if I have 18 miles right now, I can get another 13 to get to an upcoming shelter between 6-8:30 tonight.

I may get back to trail before 3, but if I can get some sleep, I’m at least going to try. Additionally, writing mid day has become something that I’m more fond of and it has the added benefit of saving me some time in the evening.

—

Many hours later now. The day’s heat built and then slowly subsided. It has yet to feel as bad this week as it did the day before reaching Harpers Ferry though. That day was a lot of elevation gain, but I’m also starting to think that my body is slowly acclimating to the heat + humidity combination in a way that I didn’t anticipate happening. To be perfectly clear, the heat is still oppressive. But it hasn’t made me want to die like it did that day on the Rollercoaster before Harpers Ferry. I doubt however that I’ll be able to make that claim into next week. Like I said earlier, the forecasts are calling for brutal temperatures in the next three days.

Although I got bigger miles today–breaking 30+ for the first time in awhile–I don’t expect that in the next three days. I’m not getting up quite so early, and I also expect to rest for longer mid day.

Tomorrow I’ll get out to trail at around 630am, and hope to get into Delaware Water Gap at around 9am. It’s all downhill into town, but it’s also still rocky.

I need to do a very small resupply at the local grocer, but only for 30 miles or so. Ahead there’s another resupply, and I don’t want to carry more food than I’ll need. Especially in this heat.

Most importantly however, DWG has a local bakery, and it’s rated highly. I love a good local bakery like nobody’s business.

I’ll see you on the other side (of a muffin or something).

Wormwood.

AT Day 70

Miles Today: 21.06

AT Mile: 1261.4

(Palmerton, PA)

“Absolute bullshit, if you ask me!” The old man grumbled at me yesterday while I was trying to write and he was trying to be heard in his grumbling.

He’d been going on and on about all the things in the world and in his life that are terrible, while I glanced over his direction intermittently to give enough attention so that he didn’t feel ignored, but also not so much that I was distracted from my thoughts. As I continued writing he continued telling me about how “they” are going to close down and demolish the Ekville Shelter and how he’d been the site host there for over 30 years.

“Can I ask what you think of Donald Trump?” He asked, seeming to take his rant in a dramatic new direction. But before I could answer he fortunately filled in the blank with his own opinion: “I hate the bastard! And technically he’s my landlord…”

Before becoming site host at that shelter in the mid 1990s, the old man had hiked the Appalachian Trail twice, although when I asked about some of the details of his hike he quickly changed the subject, leading me to question the authenticity of his claims.

Finally, after enough prodding I engaged and asked, “So this place is run by the National Park Service?”

“Yep.”

“So you’re overseen by the Department of the Interior, right?”

To this he shrugged his shoulders and said he didn’t know, which seemed odd to me considering that he had just spent so much time bitching and moaning about the government taking away his job next year and his losing his subsidized housing.

“I think it is,” I continued. “If this is run by the Park Service, then it must be the Department of Interior.”

Again, the old man shrugged.

“And forgive me for pushing you on this, but I don’t think that makes Donald Trump your landlord. Donald Trump doesn’t own the National Parks. He may have a lot of power over NPS funding, but he doesn’t ‘own’ the parks themselves. The parks belong to the American people. That’s your landlord. It’s not Donald Trump.”

Immediately it became clear that in the 30+ years that this guy had probably been sitting in that exact same bench, bitching and moaning the exact same complaints that he was today, that he’d rarely been challenged on his perspectives. He had so much to say while I was trying to write, but the moment that I turned the conversation into questioning his claims, he got quiet.

When I asked him what kind of work he did before this, he shrugged. When I asked what skillsets he has that might be employable he literally said, “I don’t want to talk about it.” In short, he was grumpy and full of complaints.

Two years ago I wouldn’t have understood the old man. Two years ago I was still living under the illusion that some stories are perfect and have happy endings. Before I knew that everything in the world is more complicated than we’ll ever even understand.

I was 11 days from my wedding when my fiance “had a spiritual awakening” that led her to change her mind about getting married. The following 18 months were a spiral into the ground for me. And I remember saying during that spiral, that I understood now how bitter old men are made. First, give a man more happiness than he could have even believed was possible. Then, take it away from him in the moments before it’s in his hands. Finally, watch as he unwravels into a bitter old man.

I saw then that I could have let that event turn me into a bitter old man, but I wasn’t ready to surrender to it yet. Instead, I pulled up my britches, put on my big-boy boots, and continued on with trying to make something of my life.

It got dark there for some time in that chapter. I’ve said before in these journals that it nearly killed me. I’m glad today that it didn’t and that I made it to the AT instead. So far this has turned out better than the alternative, I suppose.

But as I sat there listening to the bitter old man who caretakers the Eckville Shelter, it reminded me that men like him aren’t born that way; they’re made that way from experiences that life brings them and the choices they make in reaction to those experiences.

I could have become a bitter old man too. Shit… maybe it’s too early to make that call and I still will… But for now I’d like to believe that I’ve avoided it… at least in this chapter of my life. I may still be bitter sometimes. But at least I’m not a bitter f*cking bellend.

Maybe, I thought, if they do end up closing his shelter down, then he should got out for a third hike of the AT. He seemed like he was overdue.

—

Last night I camped at the same shelter as Stranger, although I set up my tent and he stayed in the shelter with another hiker. I remembered him saying something about rain in the overnight forecast, so I purposefully left my earplugs out when I fell asleep. But how long the rain had been falling before it woke me, I do not know. Mostly it seemed that I was able to get the vestibule zipped up before anything became too wet. I would have zipped it up when I went yo sleep, but left it open to get some fresh air. It’s been so hot. Even at night now, it’s so hot!

I had been so tired as I set camp that I almost stumbled into the tent and onto my pad before dozing off. I almost forgot to zip the door, but after that night with the mouse running across my face, I’ve been much better about that part.

The rain started falling around midnight and fell heavy for almost an hour. I’m used to the sound of rain in my tent by now though. If anything, it’s soothing. And I fell asleep listening to it.

The next thing that woke me was an urge to piss. I almost always have to get up at night to piss–a proposition that’s not overtly daunting in the comfort of your home, but becomes significantly more challenging on a thru hike. Not unmanagably challenging, per se. But at least inconvenient.

I laid there for a few minutes, trying to ignore the discomfort in my bladder, and hoping that I could just fall back asleep.

That never works though.

It kept on, until I had to surrender and accept that it was that time of the night.

Before getting out of my tent, I thought to myself just how hard this experience of thru hiking is sometimes. I think that I get caught up in writing about a lot of the emotional/spiritual/social aspects of my hike, and I fail to highlight the parts that absolutely f*cking suck.

Maybe it’s that there are enough people out there with the complaints. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to be like the bitter old man who runs the Eckville Shelter. Maybe it’s something else that I’m too lost in the experience of the hike to be able to recognize.

But at least for a moment last night, I let myself soak in it, while I attempted to keep myself from soaking the tent in piss. That discomfort still growing.

I thought about how horrible my feet felt at the end of yesterday, having been soaked in water form the trail all day long. It seems like they’d been wet for a week. And the fog… how the fog made everything feel like it was more encompassing and haunting. I thought about how hot the temperatures had been yesterday, in spite of the fact that it was raining. How I hate being sticky and wet while I’m hiking. How I’ve been sticky and wet for so much of the trail, and how I’d be sticky and wet for so long to come still. I thought about how I can see the muscle in my upper body reducing–in spite of working every day so hard to fight through the trail, having to acknowledge that a lot of my upper body muscle is melting to the trail. I still have my daily pushups, but they can only do so much. I thought about the folliculitis that causes my legs to break out. The chaffing on my ass when it’s hot and humid. I thought about how uncomfortable, even the most comfortable of inflatable sleeping pads is. I thought about how wet my tent was now, and how it was beginning to smell like mildew.

I thought about how I still needed to get up and piss.

So I unzipped my tent, fumbled out onto my “door mat” pad, stood up, relieved myself into the forest, and took several deep breaths while I listened to piss splattering on rock. I thought to myself–sometimes this is really f*cking hard. I still love it, but sometimes it’s really f*cking hard man. Really f*cking hard.

I crawled back into my tent, zipped the door, and thought about how the alternative to all this hardship on trail was to just give up and become a bitter old man. But if those are my options, I’d rather be out here. Because I bet it’s a lot harder still to become a bitter old man than it is to attempt to take control of your life and do something as difficult as this. Laying in front of train tracks would have been easier, to be sure. But at no point have I thought that would have been the better choice for me than coming out here. This feels like where I’m supposed to be.

—

Last night my battery bank lost all of its charge, which is a modestly big problem. I should have had 4 full phone charges left on it, but the way that I accidentally hooked my watch to it last night drained the battery bank completely. It’s the second time this has happened on trail, and both times have been tremendously frusterating. It only happens when I forget to take my watch off the charger before going to sleep, which is normally not a problem. But on nights like last night, I’m sometimes too tired to remember to do it and I end up falling asleep while it’s still connected. I think what happens is that the watch keeps turning on and off after it gets fully charged, and somehow that causes the battery bank to keep feeding it power. In turn, the bank goes dead, trying to charge my already charged watch.

I share all this because it changed my plan for the day. I stopped at mile 5 to do my pushups, and when I went to check my phone battery, I realized the discharged battery bank. It meant that I was going to have to detour to the next town to recharge.

The next town was Palmerton, PA, and that’s where I’m writing my journals now.

Before getting here however, the trail jumped and dodged around rocks and boulders, as it’s so known to do in the Pennsylvania AT. It’s an amazingly frusterating task at times. Particularly after the rain from last night, the rocks and boulders all range from slightly slick to slick-as-sh*t. It’s like boulder hopping at a shoreline on low tide. I think that I mentioned a few days ago that it’s led me to fall more than a couple of times in the preceding week.

But as I stumbled rock to rock today, never seeming to actually catch my balance, I noticed the rattlesnake just as my foot touched down about 12 inches from it. It never even rattled at me, but I recognized it from the shape of the head. A small snake–maybe 3 and a half feet long at most. But still enough to nearly scare the piss out of me.

It was the first day in a week that we’ve seen blue sky. I was warned before entering PA–it’s either slippery wet rocks, or it’s rattlesnakes sunning themselves on those rocks. Today it got to be a little of both.

About an hour after the snake, I sat trailside to have a smoke, snack, and pushups, when Plinko came by. We’d been leapfrogging several times through the day. “Dude,” he exclaimed. “I just had a near-death experience!”

“Did you see the rattlesnake too?” I asked.

“No, no snakes. I just almost took a fall on the rocks back there. I cannot believe that there aren’t bones of all the hikers who have died on this stretch of trail before us! Nice of the Forest Service to clean that up for us.”

He wasn’t wrong. There were a few places this past week where if you fell it would have been bad bad bad. Not in a fall-off-a-cliff sort of bad, but a fall-all-over-sharp-jagged-rocks kind of bad.

We’ve both been fortunate to have survived this far.

Maybe two or three days of PA remain.

Plinko and I hiked into Palmerton together, neither of us planning to stay the night, but here we are. We got showers at the local gym, got a few supplies at the grocery store, and now we’ve been working on social media stuff while I’ve been writing at a local ice cream joint. Actually, it’s not all that local. The sign out front says “Spillane’s Creamery,” but when you ask up front, they tell you that all the ice cream is from Hershey. That’s the case with most of the ice cream places around here. We’re just so close to Hershey, PA, and they seem to supply the ice cream to all the shops in these parts.

We weren’t going to stay in town, but it’s been raining since we’ve been here, so we’re likely to set camp in the yard of a local trail angel. Plinko already checked in to see that it was okay. Tomorrow is forecast to be even hotter still. In the 90s. It’s going to be brutal. National Weather Service advises avoiding extended time outside the upcoming four days… not sure how I’m going to pull that off. So Plinko and I are planning to wake at 4am tomorrow and get to trail at 4:30.

Hopefully I sleep a bit better tonight.

Wormwood.

Out.

AT Day 69

Miles Today: 22.45

AT Mile: 1242.8

(Allentown Hiking Club Shelter [tent])

It was foggy this morning when I got back to trail. Shit–it’s been foggy like this and the air has felt thick for many days now. It’s growing close to a week. It’s so thick, especially in the mornings, that you can gauge the distance of something just by how much obfuscation there is from humidity in the air.

But it also *felt* foggy this morning, on an emotional/spiritual level.

I slept poorly last night–tossing and turning on the motel room floor, only getting about a half night’s rest. Then, when we stepped out to go back to trail, the air was already wet. Wet in a different way than we’ve experienced over the preceding week though. Not just cold and wet like it looked from the inside of our comfy motel room; this time it was hot and wet from the very get go.

The thought occurred to me in the first few miles of the day that if you had shown me a still frame of some of the moments that I’ve had this last week–in the heat and the rain and the humidity and the wetness–I’m not sure that I would have been willing to take on the Appalachain Trial. Not that I wouldn’t have believed that I *could* do it; rather, that I wouldn’t have been willing to go through the suffering like it’s been lately.

I knew that it would be wet when I came into the trail. But I didn’t know how to train or prepare for that wetness. Maybe I still don’t know the answer. But I am at least more resigned to the daily grind that has been the AT these past few days.

—

Around ten miles into the day I saw another hiker up trail named Flounder. We’ve been crossing paths for several weeks, every time with his insistence that we won’t see one another again because I am going so much faster. And every time he is wrong. He is from Israel and he’s shared with me some of the troubles that he and his family are going through as a result of current conflicts. He’s an older dude, but we also get along quite well. English is his second language, but he speaks it clearly.

Two nights ago we camped together at the 501 shelter; he’s actually the hiker who I met at the McDonalds and who drove back up to trail with me. While we were at the 501 I told him about meeting Boots, our time in Harpers Ferry, and how I’d been feeling about the whole thing that day. The truth was that I was feeling scared and afraid. The weight of the relationship had started to scare me after we parted in Harpers Ferry. I still had the same feelings for her as before our time together–significantly more, if anything. But I also felt conflict about whether what I really wanted was to be alone.

Flounder and I had gone into the shelter early that afternoon, and we spent the day there taking refuge from the rain. So I had time to lay the whole thing out to him in such a way that it even helped me make more sense of the situation.

Flounder shared that he was married with 4 kids, and he gave a lot of advice on the whole thing. The main theme was that I shouldn’t avoid doing something just because I’m afraid of that thing. He said that being afraid is not a good thing to let motivate your life.

Today, as we met again and hiked for 3 miles to the Eckville Shelter, he told me that he’d been thinking about me and that he’d even prayed for me the night prior. He shared that he was reminded of his sister, and that 30 years ago she had called him one day to say that she was afraid. She told him that she was scared because she was falling in love with a partner and she wasn’t sure if he was really what she wanted. Ultimately however, Flounder told me that his sister ended up marrying this guy, who at the time was just a blind date, and they ended up with three or four children.

His point–once again–was don’t let your life be driven by the things you’re afraid of.

—

I cried heavily on trail today. I just stopped hiking, stood there for a moment, and began to cry.

It was the realization that the trail will be over soon. Not soon in a “tomorrow” sense, because there are still over 900 miles to go. But it will be soon in a 100-years-to-live sense. I’ve been chipping away at the Triple Crown for more than 10 years now–most of the time without even realizing that’s what I’ve been doing. And now there are less than 1,000 miles…

I cried for a bit. Wiped my eyes. Then started hiking north again.

The end of this trail will mean a lot of things for me and for my life.

I talked about that for some time with Flounder.

—

We’re now at the Eckville Shelter, which is on private property and staffed by a site host who hiked the trail in 1991 and again in 1996. With all due respect, he is a crotchety fuck. Every bit like that Uber driver that Stranger and I had for our ride into… the Chinese restaurant last week. Everything he has to say is just about how terrible life and the world is. It’s at least part of the reason that I’m about ready to pack up my keyboard and start back to trail. I’m only 15 miles in right now. I’d like to get another 7-10.

I was going to aim to get to the next hostel, which is 13 miles from here, but so far I’ve been dragging ass a bit and don’t feel the need to bust big miles in this humidity.

It’s just past 4pm though. And although I don’t expect the air to cool that much, the temps will start dropping at least some now that it’s later. That may make the miles ahead more tolerable.

—

Seven miles later and I’m exhausted now.

I’m sleeping in my tent for the first night in a few days. I’ve missed it here. I’ll sleep well tonight.

So tired that I’m falling asleep while I write this.

Wormwood.