AT Day 114 

Miles Today: 14.53

AT Mile: 1834.1

(Solo Stealth Tent Site)

I slept in a shelter with five other hikers last night. One of them was a section hiker that I’m going to call “Dude.” He’s been a weird character in just about every interaction that I’ve had with him so far. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing–I’m sure plenty of people might say the same about me.

Out first interaction was at the Hikers Welcome Hostel, three days ago. We were both staying there, but hadn’t met until I was washing some dishes and I heard this shouting–“Hey, is anybody out there? Can any one hear me?”

I peeked around the corner to see Dude sticking his head out from the shower curtain and trying to catch my attention.

“Hey man–I forgot my towel in the bunk house. Could you go get it for me?”

I told him that it might be funny enough if I refused and just let him streak across the lawn to get it himself but that I’d rather spair us all, and so I walked across to the bunkhouse and retrieved his towel for him.

I’ve passed Dude a half dozen times in the last three days. He’s section hiking, although for the life of me I can’t figure out *where* his section begins and where it ends. All of his answers are long but never seem to contain any actual information. I’ve thought to myself several times that Magoo might be a better trail name for him, but that’s none of my business. The point is that he rambles on whenever I make the mistake of engaging with him, and his rambles seem to go on without destination.

Also, as far as I can tell, he seems to be a moron.

He’s a bit older than me, somewhere in his late 50s or 60s I’d guess, and looks quite a lot like the Milton character from the movie called “Office Space.” He traverses the trail slowly and awkwardly whenever I’ve seen him hiking, and due credit to him for getting out here to catch miles in the first place, but it doesn’t seem that he’s crossed many up to this point from what I can tell.

We keep passing one another because he’s been slack packing and shuttling around from point to point, thus piecing together a long section of the AT over some period of time that I also cannot figure out from the times we’ve talked.

I’d arrived at the shelter about a half hour before him last night, but he went right in and acted like he was about to claim the remaining prime sleep space.

“Um, excuse me,” I said. “Do you think that I could take the space up against the wall tonight, or are you trying to put your stakes on it by standing there already?”

We both looked at one another, then Dude looked away. “Well, I mean…” I could tell that he was trying to find the words to say and avoid confrontation while still claiming that sleep space for himself, which felt pretty obviously claimed before he even arrived. “It’s just that I kind of like sleeping against the wall.”

I grumbled a bit and said that I’d just sleep down below on the bottom sleeping space and nothing else needed to be said about it.

The bottom sleeping space ended up being okay after all. I slept very well. Better than I’ve slept in a week or so. When I woke up to piss Dude was snoring like a freight train, but I always put in ear plugs when I’m sleeping around other hikers. I learned that lesson fifteen hundred miles ago.

But since I was sleeping in a shelter and with other people, I knew that I was going to struggle to get to sleep. So I took a melatonin.

I woke up early this morning to insanely vivid dreams of my ex-fiancé trying to murder me. It was terrifying. It was also familiar in that I continue to have these Kafka nightmares about half the time that I take melatonin and I never noticed that before this trail.

For some reason there felt like there was symbolism in the dream this morning. Like I had never had a dream where she had that look on her face, but it was a look that I had seen on her before we ever broke apart, and in real life. It was a look of absolute hate, set on destruction. It’s hard to describe, but I might spend some time thinking about it from here and find some better words for it if that still feels important later on.

The dreams don’t always stick with me the way that this one did. There’s an image from it stuck in my mind of her pointing a gun at me and firing at me through a window. Like she had decided to kill me and that was all that mattered to her after that decision was made. It’s the look on her face that sticks with me.

It felt too real.

—

While Dude was setting up his sleeping pad and bag last night he made some kind of comment about kids doing drugs. It seemed sort of out of the nowhere, but it was in remark to how many kids and families were at the site we were sharing. Something to the affect that it’s good to see that some kids still get out instead of just sitting at home and getting high all day. The gist of it was that “drugs are bad.” It wasn’t anything new. But he was saying something disparaging and entirely overgeneralized. I shouldn’t have been surprised, knowing what I’ve learned about him this far, but for some reason I made the choice to engage.

“I wonder if you’ve ever been challenged on that, Dude. I wonder if you’ve ever thought that drugs aren’t always so bad as you make them out to be.”

Dude grumbled a bit, then said that he didn’t see how that could be true. “I’ve seen a lot of people do a lot of stupid things when they’re on drugs.”

“Ha! If that’s all we’re basing it on Dude, I’ve seen a lot of people do a lot of stupid shit when they’re *not* on drugs. So by that thinking, not doing drugs is causing these people a serious behavioral problem!”

Dude rolled out his sleeping pad and rested it on top of the air pad that took him about four times longer to blow up than it should have. But I should cut him some slack. He is a moron after all.

“In my experience Dude,” I went on, “when people do stupid shit on drugs, it’s usually the kinds of people who are going to do stupid shit without drugs. Some people are just asshats, man!”

Dude grumbled some more and said that he still disagreed. “Well it didn’t do any good for my son. They really messed my son up. He did a lot of stuff, and now he’s all messed up from drugs.”

I gave some consideration before saying anything, but decided that we’d come this far and there was no sense stopping now. “It might be that your son would have been messed up either way. For what it’s worth Dude, ‘drugs’ have done a lot of good in my life, and if I’d listened to the rule-followers who told me that I was going to lose my mind if I did LSD, then some of the greatest things that have happened in my adult life never would have come to be.”

The comedian Bill Hicks said it best. He said: I think drugs have done some good for us. I really do. And if you don’t think drugs have done us any good, then I want you to do me a favor. I want you to go home tonight and take all your tapes and all your records and all your CDs and burn them! Because the musicians who made all that great music that’s enhanced your life so much throughout the years… reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeal fucking high on drugs!

—

This is a theme that’s coming up a lot for me. And it’s not unique to this trail or even this part of the AT necessarally. It might just be that I’m only now recognizing it as something at all.

It’s still a rough idea, so let me play with it. I might not get it onto the page the first time.

But the idea starts with this premise: That people want to hear about my story of the Appalachain Trial; a lot of people follow it and are really engaged. And I think that’s great.

But the problem is that a lot of those same people don’t actually want the story that I have tell. They want the simplistic, romantic, Pocohauntis, one-with-nature story, or something like that. I think that they want “the hills are alive with the sound of music” type stuff. Most of those people who want to know the story don’t want for it to start with one of my best friends dying when we were little kids, or about struggling with suicidal ideation and depression for long chapters of my young adult life. They don’t want the story that involves a lot of psychedelics over the years and that thing that we call “drugs” bringing me a lot more clarity than a lot of other conventional routes.

They want the hills to be alive with the sound of music, and maybe a story of a happy walk through the woods. A lot of them don’t want a story about coming out here for the reasons that I actually came out here for. The story about running away from something back home isn’t as appealing to nanna’s metaphorical church group.

—

We crossed paths again this morning at the first AMC Mountain Hut of the White Mountains. Dude had made some comments about setting his alarm for 3:30 this morning, and I told him that he was absolutely out of his mind. After some persuasion he agreed to set it a bit later but was still packed and out before I ever pulled my earplugs out this morning and started stirring about for myself.

It turns out that he’d been onto trail about three hours before I started this morning. I caught up to him in about an hour. He was sitting at a table at the AMC hut with an empty bowl of eggs and a half a cup of coffee resting in front of him.

He was sitting with another hiker and talking in a big bombastic way about the dangers of the trail south of here. The other hiker was obviously a southbound hiker and he seemed engaged in whatever bullsh*t Dude was spewing.

I walked over and sat down with them, and without waiting even an instant, I went right into it: “Are you fear mongering again, Dude? That’s all I’ve heard from you every time I catch you talking to another hiker!” And it was true. Just about every time I saw him talking to another hiker, he was talking about claims of giant cliff faces, dangerous slippery rocks, impossible climbs, and a variety of other fears that lived somewhere deep inside of his heart.

I have approximately zero patience for fear mongering. In all the ways that I can be, it is my desire to be the anti-fear-munger.

Dude looked over at me and said that it all depends on your level of experience, and I exclaimed–“Exactly! And I don’t think that you need to spread your fears on other hikers just because they scared you man! I keep hearing you do it since the day we met. I don’t mean to be rude man, but you gotta cut that shit out.”

I turned to the southbound hiker. He was young, looked rugged, and other than seeming a little rattled from talking with Dude, he was obviously able bodied enough to take on any of the miles that he had ahead of him from here. “If you’ve made it this far,” I said, “you won’t have any trouble making it down to Hikers Welcome Hostel from here. It’s nothing you haven’t already seen before. I promise.”

—

In spite of the murder dreams, I still slept well last night. The shelter was dark, and I slept with ear plugs, so somehow it wasn’t until 8am when I finally rolled out of bed and started making tea. That’s almost two hours later than normal.

On that note–I’ve been trying to switch back to black tea in the morning instead of coffee every day. As much as I love a cup of coffee, I genuinely feel like tea affects me better. It still wakes me up, but it doesn’t make me jittery and it doesn’t sometimes make me need to shit my pants. So there’s also that.

Black tea and honey.

—

The trail today has been spectacular. High elevation and alpine! This is what I was promised for so long as the AT traversed uncountable miles of tree tunnel. Up here feels a lot more like something on the CDT or in Colorado. The trail breaks above the tree line, the air is cooler, there’s a breeze, and it actually feels like hiking mountains again. So many of the “mountains” up to here have felt a lot more like “hills.”

It’s been beautiful. And although the climbs are a lot, the trails are good and easy to navigate. All in all it’s a lot easier than the Long Trail was. The vegetation isn’t trying to attack you at every step, the mud isn’t bad, the trail is clear and wide, the climbs have good steps built in, the rocks aren’t so slick… that list could go on.

This morning I got to a lake almost first thing and it had a dock on it. I said to myself that it was a real problem because it was so early in my day still and I got such a late start from camp, but the lake looked so incredibly swimable. And there was only one way to know for sure if it was indeed swimmable, and that was to go swimming.

The water was cold but the view of the mountain while I swam was awesome. Only later did I realize that I was looking up at some of the peaks that I’d be hiking later in the day.

The lake was just outside of the AMC Mountain Hut where I met Dude this morning, so I knew that swimming meant that he was going to catch back up with me, but I don’t put much stock into those kinds of worries. It wasn’t that big of a deal to see him again. He’s slow in the ways that matter, and as such I knew that I could get away from him again without much trouble and if he started talking, it wasn’t hard to talk circles around him. By now I had also come to realize that he might become a character in my story of the Appalachain Trail in how well he represented so many points of societal stupidity. And so here we are…

Dude walked up just as I pulled myself back up onto the dock and out of the water. I started to dry off and told him that it was his turn. “Oh, did you go swim in the lake?” He asked.

I turned to him in astonishment, standing there in just my underpants and soaking wet, water actively running out of my hair and onto the dock. This was the first time that Dude had left me truly dumbfounded to a point where I didn’t know what to say.

“I mean… did you think I just decided to strip down and sun bathe or something? How do you think I got all wet? Did you not literally see me pull myself out of the lake fifteen seconds ago.”

Dude looked at the scene for far too long and I watched some sort of computing taking place behind his eyes. Something was wrong though. It was hard to make sense of how long it took him to put things together.

Finally, and after a lot of time to think about it, he remarked with an “Oh.” And that was the last we spoke to one another today.

—

I hitched at mile 6 of my day into town to get a food resupply. I was picked up by literally the first car to drive by. It worked out so well!

Resupply was expensive and minimal, as it was more of a gas station than a grocery store, but I made it work. I also charged some electronics and ate an ice cream before stepping out to hitch back to trail. It took less than three minutes to catch a ride back. It all worked out too well!

The Frankonian Ridge was like nothing I’ve seen on the AT so far. Climbs were big today, but above tree line it was beautiful. Again, it almost reminds you of some of the miles in the big mountains of the Rockys.

—

I was told by so many people that I need to plan out my hiking of the White Moutains day by day and know where I’m camping every night. I told them that I was going to just wing it and aim for way bigger miles than they were recommending, and so far it’s worked out totally fine.

In fact, I might even say that it’s been more fun going one step at a time and just playing it by ear, as one might say… I hate that saying for reasons that long time readers may understand, but here I am using it still.

Tonight I’m camped in a little tiny opening in the trees that couldn’t fit another tent, even if you tried. It’s cozy! But it fits my tent well. I was thinking that I was going to have to cover another two or three miles of climb and that I’d end up camping at a paid site with a bunch of weekend hikers, but since I found this little site, I’m golden! It was a long wasterless stretch leading up to here and I missed getting water at the last chance I had, so I had to push a lot of dry miles at high elevation this afternoon, but I found water just a half mile back from here.

I’m extremely tired as I come to the end of this as usual. Tomorrow may be a fairly short or maybe a pretty long day. Depends on how well I sleep. Let’s start now.

Night night.

Wormwood.

AT Day 113

Miles Today: 19.60

AT Mile: 1820.4

(Kinsman Pond Shelter)

CarrotCake and I were hiking out from the hostel this morning when out of nowhere he said the unmistakable “fuck” that meant he’d forgotten something.

“My sandwich from deli. I left it in the fridge. Shit!”

We both stopped hiking and I turned back to him. I was at the table last night when the guy across from us asked if we wanted his pepperoni–said that he was “too old” for it and that pepperoni gives him heartburn. It wasn’t just a deli sandwich that he left in the fridge; it was a deli sandwich with extra pepperoni. No small loss in the context of a thru hike.

“Want to go back for it?” I asked.

He gave it a moments thought and then said no. Actually he said “fuck it,” but what he meant was no.

We’d met one another more than a thousand miles back–somewhere in Virginia. Then we hadn’t seen one another since then up until yestrday afternoon when he rolled into Hikers Welcome hostel. He recognized me right away and we both remembered meeting under the tree that afternoon with another hiker named Boardwalk. He said that he remembered me making a protein shake, doing a bunch of pushups, and then leaving. He said that he didn’t think he’d ever see me again.

A lot of hikers say that they don’t expect to see me again.

—

It was a mile later when I heard him again. He let out that same utterance of profanity that meant the same thing this time as it meant before–that he’d forgotten something else.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Did I miss the 1800 mile marker?”

I told him that it had been on the right hand side of the trail, about a half mile back from where we were standing now. That it had been written in sticks.

“Shit…” there was a moment of contemplation, and I understood why it meant something to him. These sorts of symbolic things matter on a long trail.

I wanted to make a joke about it and tell him that I didn’t want for us to hike together anymore because he seems to be such a bad vibe with is forgetting so many things and generally having a bad aura about him this morning. But I decided against it. He didn’t seem to be in the mood where a joke at his expense was going to make things better. So I kept it to myself and thought, maybe I’ll write about it in my journal.

“It’s point four back from here.”

I could tell that he was thinking about it.

“Fuck it; I’m going back.” And with that, he turned around and walked the nearly half mile back to the place on the trail where someone had drawn “1800” on the side of the trail with sticks.

He didn’t go back for the extra-pepperoni sandwich, but he did go back for the photo of 1800.

I told him later that I respected him for it. That I might have done the same.

—

A hiker asked me about boredom during my Zero day yesterday. He was a southbound hiker, and had about 400 miles underfoot so far. He asked if I ever get bored, and what I do about it.

It took me longer to answer than I expected, and I thought about it for what felt like a long time. I told him that “boredom” doesn’t feel like the right word for what I feel out here. That I think I know the feeling he’s talking about, but that I wouldn’t choose to call it boredom.

I told him that I listen to audiobooks and podcasts sometimes and that often I’ll listen to music.

I also told him that psychedelic mushrooms keep things interesting and make it hard to become bored, and he told me he might give that a try.

—

On that subject, I had a bit of mushrooms today. It was the first day that I’ve taken more than a gram in a couple of weeks.

I found that it made my climb up to my first 4,000ft peak this morning (Mount Mousaloukie) delightfully easy and that left me very thoughtful. It led me to think a lot about the book that I hope to produce at the end of this trail. More specifically, I’ve been thinking more about the story that I want to tell, drafting an outline, and considering a beginning.

During about five miles today I sort of drafted the fist pages of what I would like to see through to the first chapter of the book.

It’s easier to talk about than to actually do it, but that could be said about walking the AT too. And here we are.

—-

Today I’m camped very high up in the mountains and it’s very cold. It’s the first time on the AT that I remember my fingers being so cold as I lay down to write in the evening. The sun hasn’t even fully set (it’s only 8:15pm), but the air is already incredibly frigid.

I’m camped on a shelter floor, as all the tent sites were taken long before I arrived. The shelter and camp sites are managed by some organization throughout the White Mountains, and I am amazed by how many people are here at the camp sites! There must be at least fifteen kids and a half dozen adults. Then there are four of us camped in the shelter.

For some reason I also had to pay some money to camp here; I guess that’s a White Mountains thing too. I was warned about it in advance at least. There’s a funny story in all of this about my trading a coyote tooth for a discounted campsite, but the details for that story will have to wait for October; I told the camp host that I wouldn’t tell until then.

—

There were more people on parts of the trail today than I’ve become used to on the AT. Again, I was told to expect this from the White Mountains, and it’s also a Friday.

As I went along today, a day hiker paused as she passed me going Southbound and commented on my coyote skull.

“The skull…” I could see her formulating a question that she wasn’t quite sure how to phrase. “What’s the deal with that?”

“It’s a coyote skull.” I expalined and smiled. “

There was a tangible moments pause between us before she asked her next question. I guess she was trying to figure out what to ask.

“And what’s the story behind that?”

“Oh,” I said happily, like I always do when people ask about the coyote skull on my backpack. “I got it from a witch in Waynesboro, Virginia.”

I like an answer that elicits more questions than it answers, and this has become one of my favorite examples of the principle. For more than a thousand miles now that coyote skull has been affixed to the back of my pack, and since the very moment that I walked out that Appalachain Magik shop with it, it was sparking people’s curiosity.

There has not been a single moment were I have regretted carrying that coyote skull with me to Katadhn.

The lady’s face crinkled a bit after I explained the coyote skull her, and I could see her once again trying to think of what question to ask from here. I’ve learned that most people stop asking questions at this point and just go on their way, but she was still standing there, clearly thinking about it. Her boyfriend had caught up to her by now and was standing with us as well.

Since she didn’t seem capable of finding the next question, I broke the silence between us and offered more explanation. But it was really on the chiraide of an explanation, just like the others. Just an answer that leads to more questions.

“Its teeth started to fall out in Virginia, and so now I have a bag of its teeth. I give them to people sometimes while I’ve been hiking across the country.”

After giving it some thought, she finally said “Oh.” And that was the end of our talk. “Well I hope you have a good hike.”

“You too.” I said. “And I hope that you meet witches.”

—

I’d also like to take just a moment to acknowledge just how little I have used the name of that mountain in my trail journals up to now. I wonder if you, dear reader, have even noticed.

Well, the truth that I have been avoiding it. And the reason for it is because I have approximately no idea whatsoever how to go about spelling it properly.

And instead of just looking it up and commuting it to memory, I’m instead going to continue to either avoid it or admittedly misspell it for the rest of this god damn trial.

I guess I’d just rather get that out there than keep avoiding it altogether and worry that one of you are going to call me out for spelling it wrong. Before you can even do it, I’ve beat you to it.

—

I cried for several minutes today about the Appalachian Trail coming near its end. I know that I’d been having my emotional moments about that ever since the beginning of the trail, but today my face streaked heavily with tears.

It was this morning, while I was still affected by the mushrooms. That’s when I’m always most primed to cry.

I imagined what it might be like to finish the trail. I thought about the signicance that will play in my life.

I cried for several minutes.

—

The Zero day must have been what my body needed yesterday. I didn’t sleep so well the night before last, but last night I slept like a stone. And my body felt better for it today.

The climbs today were supposed to be brutal. To be fair, they were difficult, and today was the highest elevation gain day that I’ve had on the AT so far. I climbed more than 9,000ft, which is significantly more than any day I even saw on the Long Trail!

But I was told by the hosts of the Hikers Welcome Hostel that trying to push twenty miles today was not a good idea. They didn’t flat out say that I couldn’t to it, but they made it sound *way* more difficult than it ended up being.

Partly that may have been because of my having taken the Long Trail and having that to compare things to, but that was also some of the motivation that I had to hike the Long Trail in the first place. I remember when Plinko and I started that trail and how we talked about what it would feel like when we finished up and came back to the Appalachian Trail. We imagined that he White Mountains might even feel easy by comparison, and so far that is how I’ve felt.

Mind you that the miles today were still challenging. But the temps are better now (even cold up here as I write this tonight). There’s plenty of water at the water sources. The trail isn’t overgrown like the Long Trail was…. that list could go on.

—

I added to my notes to write something about how much I miss some of the people from back home–people who I did not get to see this summer.

Some of them I don’t know that I will see again. I burned some bridges before I came out here. Not all of them, but there were some that I burned behind me. There are some people back home whom I do not plan to ever see again.

But then again, I didn’t expect to see or speak to Plinko ever again, and that’s already proven to be wrong.

There are some friendships in particular that left my heart aching today. I won’t list them here, as that part doesn’t necessarily matter. The point of it seems to be to capture that challenge of thru hiking–the pain of being away from the people you love for such an extended period of time.

There are some of them that I miss so profoundly that I can’t put it into words.

—

Alright. I’m growing tired now. It’s nearly 9pm.

Tomorrow I have five miles to get to the road that will bring me into Lincoln, New Hampshire which is my next resupply.

They have two different hostels I could stay at, but I don’t feel like I need the rest. Furthermore, the weather is so good that I don’t want to waste the day being off trail if I can avoid it. So I think that I’m going to go in, resupply and come back to trail tomorrow. I’m aiming for 17 miles, plus the resupply, and that should be somewhat difficult to achieve, but I was also told to expect that from today.

But as always–we’ll see.

—

First night sleeping in a shared shelter in more than two weeks.

Wormwood.

AT Day 112

Miles Today: 0

AT Mile: 1799.4

(Hikers Welcome Hostel)

It rained through much of the night last night, and looks as if it’s going to do the same for the rest of the day today.

It’s still morning as I write this, the opposite of my normal routine, but it’s a rare day that I’m taking off the trail *without* abounding distractions. It’s quite the opposite of most of the Zero days that I’ve taken so far on the AT. It’s a quiet hostel, there’s one other thru hiker who’s also taking a zero, and it’s the hostel staff (and a super-chill dog named Turk).

As such, I have the time to write. I also have some time to myself to think… yes, I have the trail and the miles to think, but it’s not the same as being off the trail with time to think.

—

Plinko texted me a couple of days ago. He said that he felt bad about the way that he’d left. He’d sent me a few messages trying to justify leaving so abruptly, but none of them made much sense of the situation. I still felt hurt by it.

But then he messaged me telling me that he was camped only a couple miles up trail from me two nights ago. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when I arrived here at the Hikers Welcome Hostel and they said he’s here as well.

“I don’t know if you’ve met Plinko, but he’s staying here tonight too,” the host told me when I arrived.

“Yes,” I said. “We’ve met.”

It was incredibly awkward when he walked by and we bumped fists. I didn’t know what else to do in the situation. But later in the evening he stepped up to me as I was changing laundry and authentically appologized for the way that he’d handled himself at his parting in Rutland. It was sincere and heartfelt. He mentioned a family situation that he’d received notice about prior to our finishing the Long Trail and that he “didn’t handle [himself] well.”

It wasn’t something that I was wanting or expecting from him, but it was received well. And I told him as much. That I was grateful and accepting of his apology. We talked a bit more last night, I told him about the bear in my camp two nights before, and he talked about his plan for hiking the White Mountains ahead.

It is unlikely that we will hike together from here, and there are many reasons for that. But I’m happy that most of them are logistical reasons and have less to do with resentment than what either of us were probably feeling before.

He left to trail early this morning and is planning to blast through the White Mountains. He and I hike very differently, it turns out. And so he’ll hike his hike and I’ll hike mine. I don’t know if we’ll share miles again after this hike. If we’re supposed to then I suppose we will. Time will tell the rest of that story if there is ever more to tell.

—

With the rain out there today the hiking looks miserable. Yesterday it was the heat, and today it’s the rain. It’s like I just can’t be pleased… But really that’s not true. The weather the rest of this week looks ideal, and I really don’t want to go up and over Mount Moosilauke today in the rain. Southbound hikers have told me that it’s one of the best views for the rest of the trail from the top, and today it’d be completely clouded in and raining. The alternative is to wait out today, hit it tomorrow, and hopefully have ideal temperatures and weather.

Unfortunately this will also mean I’m entering the White Mountains on the weekend, which will end up putting a lot of people on trail, but I’d rather that than hike a day of misery today in the rain and then drag that same energy into the rest of this week.

It almost feels like I’m starting to justify a Zero now… I really don’t think that I am.

—

I’m at the point where I need to be looking into my finish date and after-trail plan. Technically I already had these planned out, but you’ll remember that thing about planning–it often doesn’t go according to plan.

My “plan” for after the trail was all laid out before I took the Long Trail detour, but after that the dates are all mixed up now. I had “planned” on having 3 weeks after the AT before returning to Arizona and my life back home. The last of those three weeks was going to be spent with Boots who will be driving up from Tennessee. And I “planned” on the Long Trail taking 7-10 of those days when it ended up taking 13 days… almost two weeks.

So now I’m scheduled to finish the trail basically within one or two days of Boots arriving in Maine. She’s taking time off work and can’t shift the dates of her travel, so I’m sort of in a pinch to finish by the 19th.

From the people I’ve talked with at this hostel (who have hiked the AT and know what they’re talking about), it’s going to be hard to finish in that timeline. Or, said differently, in order to finish by the 19th I will need to *haul ass* for the next 400 miles. That’s not something that I want to do but it is something I’m capable of doing if need be.

Taking a zero day today doesn’t put me at the end of the trail any sooner… but I’m well past the point of prioritizing miles over smiles. This hike is too important to me to be blasting through as quickly as I can. I got off that train at Trail Days! And I want to enjoy my miles for the next three weeks, or whatever’s left.

I also acknowledge that it’s not just the timeline with Boots that’s tight, but also I’m losing some of the time that I’d set aside to work on my writing after the trail. And that is tremendously important to me.

I’ve started to ask if I might should just push my return to Arizona back by a week or two. There’s nothing set in stone that says I need to be there by September 1st. I do have a tattoo appointment to get “AT25” on the back of my ankle on August 28th, but that could be rescheduled if need be. And I told my boss I’ll be back by September 1st. But that isn’t in writing and can be pushed back. There’s some rent and housing stuff… but that can all be pushed off.

These are the thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head the last 36 hours or so. There’s a lot of time on trail to think about things like these, but sometimes that’s all the thoughts do is bounce… sometimes they never land until you take a day off trail and give yourself some time to rest and digest.

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I might not be returning to Arizona so early after all…

I have some time to think about it, but need to find resolution on that sometime soon. Need to start thinking about tickets back and things like that.

Wormwood