AT Day 123

Miles Today: 5.35

AT Mile: 1951.5

(The Om Dome Hostel, Maine)

I’ve been thinking about attachment lately. Attachment of all different kinds. To places, things, and to people. We get attached to a feeling or a routine. We attach to the things that are familiar and predictable.

We are creatures of habit after all.

This was brought into focus for me last night, when a panic spread through my whole body in reaction to the realization of having lost my gallon zip lock trash bag.

There was no conceivable monetary value in it, as it was nothing more than what I’ve already described: a big ziplock bad, used for holding my trail trash. The value in it was that I’d acquired it in my first week of the AT and that it had lasted me up to now–almost four months I’d been with that trash bag.

At every trail town or trailside trash can I’d empty it out, seal it back up, and pop it back into my food bag. And around 800 miles back I started to remark at what a thing it was that this measly ziplock trash bag had made it so far into the trail with me. Plinko was amazed by it as well. He remarked that I must not have much nasty trash–tuna packets were the example he used. I told him nope, I don’t do tuna on trail. For the record, I also don’t do Tuna off trail unless it’s fresh caught because I’m a fresh fish snob (result of being raised in coastal Alaska), but that’s a longer discussion for another day.

But yesterday I lost it. I had my hands full and my head was boiling from the heat. Don’t even try to tell me that it was the weed because I wasn’t even stoned. It was too hot to even want to get stoned. It was too hot for anything except dying or begging for death.

I had my wallet in one hand and my trusted trash bag in the other. As I tossed in the trash hand, I kept reciting in my head, “don’t don’t don’t don’t DONT throw out the stuff in your other hand.”

As I tossed in the trash, my empty Propaine can bounced off the rim and out the side. I reached down, and detracted by it, didn’t even think about the fact that I’d just tossed my trash bag rather than emptying it into the can as I’ve been doing all the way up trail until now.

I threw out my trash bag without even realizing it.

There were some moments after the panic set in last night that I thought about going back for it. It would have been four miles… all downhill. And the heat that I’d gone through to get to camp last night…

It was basically out of the question. But I still had to play through my mind for a moment what kinds of things I might *would* have gone back for.

Another chance at the opportunities I missed or the good things I lost, for example. But we never get those kinds of opportunities. There’s never the option of taking back my biggest mistakes in trade for hiking a few miles downhill and back into town.

Wouldn’t that be nice?

But instead, when we make those mistakes, we have to do more than just hiking four miles downhill and back into town. Instead we give up everything that is our lives, we put everything that’s left into a backpack, we fly across the country to Georgia, and we start hiking a 2,200 mile trail without any idea what it’s going to do for our need for healing and wholeness.

Funny, the lives we live and the paths we follow, isn’t it?

“Shit!” I said it aloud even though I was the only one at camp to hear it. The ziplock was nowhere to be found. I’d emptied both my food bags twice and checked in my backpack as well.

A trash bag.

A silly ziplock trash bag.

But somehow, it left me feeling broken and even more alone than I already was in the forest last night. When you boil all your life down into something so small as to fit into a pack on your shoulders, it doesn’t take much loss from that lot to feel like you’ve lost the whole world.

It didn’t take long, but I had my minute or two of existential crisis at camp last night before giving up and accepting that it was gone. Even in the imaginary world where going back for the trash bag *was* an option, the store would have been closed by now and they would have emptied their trash bins.

It was gone.

Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

That’s been one of the big lessons of this trail. One of the biggest. That nothing lasts. Not even the things that we think will be with us through us all.

The loving faces of our family that are there to greet us when we arrive in this life–they’re likely all gone by the time we take our last breath. And here for some time I thought that the people we meet along the way were the things that last. But these last two years have proved that to be wrong.

For a few years I let myself believe that I’d found the path that I was supposed to follow in life. I became comfortable and felt safe in the feelings of familiarity. I let myself believe that this was what my life was meant for. I let myself believe that the partner I was with was the person I was supposed to spend the rest of my life with.

I let myself believe those things, even though I hadn’t believed in those kinds of things before.

And now those things are gone.

And now I’m here thinking about how things come and go in our lives, and that there really is no constant. Everything is changing into something else. Even these moments of illusion where we feel like this *must* be it and we’ve *really got it.* Those moments are ultimately fleeting as well, and the *things* that hold them together are as temporary as the passage of the hour in which I write these words today.

A bag of trash…

A bag of trash…

It caught my attention that I’d become so attached to a bag of trash.

And how impossible it was this morning to miss the metaphor within that statement. I’d become attached to a bag of trash.

What then might I learn from this about the other things in my life that I feel like I’ve lost but cannot live without?

A chuckle escaped me as I thought about the simplest form of the metaphor. “I was crying over losing a bag of trash.” I said, once again speaking to the nobody who shared the trail with me this morning. The statement was intended to be as ambiguous as it sounded.

I was crying over losing a bag of trash.

I don’t want to go too far with that metaphor. I don’t want to reduce the woman I almost married down to “a bag of trash.” But there was some value in the though, even if it was going to take a couple miles of trail to pull it out.

Maybe the point of it was to be mindful of the things we become attached to, and be aware that the longing of our heart alone might not be enough to determine the value of something in our lives. We may still pine for the loss of things that we didn’t really need after all.

I wonder too if there isn’t some value in the repetitive practice of losing the things that are important to us.

Within the last ten days I’ve left my long-handled titanium spoon, my tent’s footprint, and now my ziplock-gallon trash bag. Two years before losing all of those things I lost the path of life that I thought I was supposed to be following. Two years ago I had a lot of things that I similarly thought were important to me. Now a lot of those things are gone, and I’m still here, wondering if I needed them all along.

—

The trees were screaming this morning–screaming so loud with the sound of an early morning locust that it woke me up and brought me into today. I popped ear plugs into each ear and went back to sleep, thinking about the early days of the trail when temperatures were cooler and I’d yet to hear the sound of screaming cicadas.

The scream of cicadas started in Pennsylvania and I remember that it was so loud that it literally sounded like a roaring railroad track. It took several hours of the intense buzz before I was able to deduce what it actually was. Admittedly I was on psychedelic mushrooms at the time, so that might have skewed my ability to figure out what the buzzing was, but still. The point is that I’ve been listening to that same buzz of cicadas any time the temperatures soar on trail.

They’re quiet on cooler days. But it’s almost as if they’re the an early sign of the heat that will build in the day.

It was like that this morning, and I knew it was going to be intensely hot from the screaming cicada that couldn’t have been far from where I planted my tent last night.

—

I knew that it was going to be hot even before hearing the screaming trees though. It was in the forecast. What a time we live in, where the computers in our pockets that we call “phones” can tell us a prediction of the weather anywhere in the entire world for the next ten days. Or, more specific to my story, isn’t it amazing how it can predict the impending doom of yet another summer heat wave as it descends onto the eastern United States?

Still, I left Andover yesterday afternoon thinking that I was going to be able to make it through. I don’t know *why* I thought I could make it through temperatures this high, based on what I’ve experienced so far on trail this summer, but I guess I’m stubborn. But heat is heat. And humidity makes it worse.

The heat overnight wasn’t so terrible, but first thing this morning the cicadas were loud, and within the first mile of trail I was already soaking wet through and through all of my clothes. It was going to be a bad, bad day.

I’d washed my shirt in a river last night, and I did what I could to bath my body with what little surplus water I had hauled up the mountain. But that only helped so much. My clothes still smelled like vinegar, foot, and assh*les. My skin was all sticky. I’d reached the point where I could barely stand how terribly I smelled.

There was a passing thought that I might be able to bathe in a river later on in the day, or maybe even make it to the lake at mile 22 from where I’d camped, but it only took that first mountain climb for me to realize that it wasn’t going to be an option to continue on. I needed to get off trail.

Checking my digital maps I learned that there were three different hostel options within 30 miles of the trail. Fortunate for me.

I’d heard very good things about “The Om Dome” just outside of Andover, and tried reaching out. Didn’t have any luck, but I was able to get through to Boots who is on her day off today. Told her I need to get off trail but that service was spotty and that the heat was making my thinking go wonky.

And just like I should have known, she had a solution. My ride was basically waiting for me at the road crossing when I made my descent at mile 5 of my day.

—

I don’t like getting off trail, especially knowing that tomorrow’s going to be just as hot as today. But it felt less and less like I had an option with every progressive mile.

I hate hiking when it’s this humid and hot. I needed to leave the trail.

And so the final deciding factor was realizing that my plan for after the trail is to spend a the days before Boots arrives working on my writing at a hostel somewhere around Baxter State Park. So taking today to do the same is just shifting my days around. I maintain my sanity a bit better, get some writing done, and I can go back to hiking in two days when the temps drop 20 degrees, which it should be noted is basically the average temp for this time of year.

—

The Om Dome is indeed a super nice hostel–amongst the best that I’ve visited on trail. I like it here. They have air conditioning and a good “energy,” if you are comfortable with my calling it that. There are other hikers here, a few travelers, and a couple of cool dogs. One of the dogs is a pug with his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth. He’s sitting at my feet as I write this. It feels nice to me.

—

I think that’s about it.

Glad to have the time off. I’m also anxious to get back to trail and finish off the last 250 miles, but the heat is out of my hands. If there is such a thing as “god” then maybe she wanted me to get off trail and spend some time with the written word and keyboard today.

Might it be a good day to write an outline and the opening chapter to a book. I’ve played them through my head enough over the last 500 miles. Today I start putting them to the page.

Wormwood.

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.

AT Day 121

Miles Today: 16.45

AT Mile: 1933.4

(Baldpate Lean-to [tent])

I was reminded today that I’m not the only one who feels this way. I’m not the only one who screams profanity into the open mountain air. I’m not the only one tired of the heat. I’m not the only one frusterated by the lack of progress in spite of the abundance of effort. I’m not the only one who has reached the limits of his patience.

Today I met a hiker named OldSchool who I haven’t seen in almost a thousand miles. We sat down together at first and had some water and snacks. When the conversation got to how we’re currently feeling about the trail, we both agreed that we are no longer having fun. OldSchool echoed a lot of the things that I’ve been feeling and that I listed in my last journal. He also said that tempers amongst other hikers seem to be getting tight as well. He relayed a story from last night where one hiker snapped at another in the shelter for having his headlamp’s red light on.

“I think everyone is feeling a bit on edge after these last couple hundred miles of trail,” OldSchool said. And just in hearing him say that I felt something shift inside of me. Like the realization that I’m not the only one walking in hell makes it somehow more tolerable.

Might it have to do with not feeling so alone? Might it connect back to that primal desire that started this whole walk in the first place? Is it just about not wanting to feel like I’m the only one?

—

Temperatures were hot today. They are forecast to become hotter in the coming four days. Today it was 88 degrees with hug humidity. By the end of the weekend it will be in the 90s.

I remember having a thought about my foot pain on the PCT, that if I had known my foot pain was going to be that bad for the entire trail, I likely would not have made it to the end. I just kept believing all along the way that eventually it was going to go away or get better, but it never did until I stopped hiking after the end of the trial.

That’s how I feel about the heat and humidity of this trail. I was completely delusional in thinking that the temperatures would be more managable by now. I was clearly wrong. I actually thought that maybe by the time I crossed the Mason/Dixon line that temperatures would start to slowly cool off. But in fact, they just got hotter from there. And now the trail is in its northernmost state, and it’s still unbearable.

I cannot stress enough just how much the heat of this trail affects things for the worse! It has taken so much away from my enjoyment of this hike.

Today I had the thought that if you were to take everything that you associate with hiking, then take out all of the parts that are enjoyable or make hiking fun, then what you have left is the f*cking Appalachian Trail. And I’m sorry for being so blunt and crass about it, but the heat makes me feel that way.

It’s hot from the moment I wake up in the morning until after I finish dinner. It’s awful. I only wish there were better words for it than I can find now. So it’ll have to remain only that–awful. But remember that it’s worse than that; it’s worse than awful.

—

I had a trail magik moment this afternoon.

I was going to go into Bethel for food resupply, but met with OldSchool who convinced me to wait for the next town. Also, the hostel that I was hoping to stay at in Bethel said that they had no space available today. So I continued on, but just before leaving that last parking lot, someone walked by. It was the author named Emily whom I had met at Trail Days, and who offered her home to me after the trail. She lives close to the end of the AT and has opened her home up for a few days so that I can start collecting my thoughts and working on turning these journals into something larger and more structured.

She’s been up here supporting two other hikers who live near her, and so I knew that she was close by. But I didn’t expect to see her today.

We talked for a half hour and she fed me donuts and a ham sandwich. Which will be enough food to tide me over to the next town of Andover.

I have the choice of going to Andover in 8 or in 20 miles. I’ll decide tomorrow.

—

Hiked through “the notch” today. It’s supposedly the “most difficult mile of the AT.” My feeling on the matter after today is that it’s just the most poorly built mile of trail. A lot of the trail these last few days has been miserable. The climbs are untenable and the descents are unenjoyable. These were trials built before people knew how to build trails. They strip the fun from hiking.A

And I know I’m not the only one who feels that way.

—

So tired that I can barely keep both eyes open. I’m dozing off.

Wormwood.