Appalachian Trail 2005, 1000 miles

Journal from Fred and Kim's Appalachian Trail hike, 8/19- 12/18,

1000 miles

AT News #1  8/30/05 Harper’s Ferry

             

Hello out there. Here is the first installment of our AT trip. We have just come from Caledonia State Park in PA to Harper's Ferry W. VA in some 5 days, across South Mountain mostly, a long rolling mountain that contains beautiful hardwood forest and lots of Civil War history.  We have both enjoyed seeing the immediate battle sites and long distance views of the great battle sites, such as Antietam (Sharpsburg). The fog sat ghostlike in Fox's Gap over a field dripping with dew and the sense of lingering spirits. There are graves, memorials, plaques and statues. We walk right through the Civil War!

We stop and chug water, pack face with M and Ms, PB and J, dry fruit and then we slog onward, averaging about 10 miles a day but 11 twice so far. Kim has some vicious blisters, one that she popped here at the AT office. Our bodies are doing well in general except for feet, which hurt and demand ibuprofen at night.  The packs have been quite heavy, too heavy, and we have thrown out some and shipped off other. We ordered a new tent 8 pounds lighter by mail and plan to take further measures to lighten up.  Now our total pack weights are probably around 55 for me and 45 for Kim, this gets more beastly with full water at 8.5 pounds per gallon, 1 gallon each for a long dry stretch. However, we have chosen this so there is no use to complain of our plight.  The forest is full of giant, I mean giant hardwoods, all sorts of oaks, beech, hickory, walnut, that gives a sense of what the great American hardwood forest must have been like. There are also huge vines that remind one of Tarzan, and strike the fear of poison ivy into me.  Wildlife sightings include a bald eagle, blue herons, hummingbirds, many insects (not too bad), toads, newts, deer, fawns and no bears or any bear-sign.

The AT is odd in a way. We are in the woods but it is not wilderness; we are out there yet we can see and hear the sounds and sights of civilization.  The adventure is fun to share with those who are out here with us and it becomes a bit like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, a thick adventure with many stories, side trails and purposes.  Many have trail names, Kim has tried on The Little Red Caboose, as we may be the last ones to finish and I have tried out Cargo Train, due to the weight of my pack.

Now we are in Harper's Ferry, W. VA, at the AT office. We will camp tonight or maybe stay in a hostel. We'll tour town tomorrow and absorb the rich history that is Harper's Ferry.  It is interesting and both of us thirst to know, many different things, and now the dogs will get their bone, a town full of free museums!

In addition to our gear being heavy, we smell awful, a sort of sour reeking sweat combined with foot odor, underarm odor, smoke, etc., which actually may keep the bugs off.  Tonight we look forward to laundry, showers etc., while trying to hold onto our wallets and not be wicked dry by the tangling tentacles of capitalism and comfort.

Kim has planned well and remains the Captain of the expedition, which we both like.  She looks at the books and maps at night to see what we have coming the next day and also planned initially for all our package drops and food purchasing.  At night we have eaten like hogs, huge portions, gulped down with insatiable appetite.  These may be the first signs and symptoms of hiker's appetite where we can take over 5000 calories a day and still be losing weight.  Thru-hikers look forward to the "half gallon challenge" in Pen-Mar Park just across the Mason-Dixon Line, there a half gallon of ice cream is offered free for those who can eat it all.

So that is about it for now.  Life is quite different when you have to walk for everything and cannot just drive; it puts a new perspective on how we live.

Now we are off to finish W.VA and then go into Shenandoah National Park. The mountains loom and the warm up period is closing.  The dreams have been vivid and the nights full of crickets, toads and tree frogs chirping and the cicadas fill the ears by day, in the land of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, the Potomac River, the Shenandoah River, the Susquehanna, etc. We walk through the forests as they are and also through the forests of history and time.  I remember songs that bring to mind American history, Oh Shenandoah...Dark as Dungeon, after we see huge coal trains going by the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers.

Well, that's about all folks and until next time. 

Yours Truly, Cargo Train and The Little Red Caboose.

9/2 The Bear's Den

Greetings from a hostel next to the trail called the Bears Den. We walked 13 miles today and took it into Bluemont, a sleepy hollow in VA where we had our new tent shipped from Campmor; we got an MSR Hubba Hubba, 4 lbs, 10 oz, mucho dinero but like 8 pounds less then my North Face VE 24 (thanks George). Now Kim is collating our food, 13 pounds from a re-supply drop box. We'll soon go upstairs for some singing and guitar picking. As we got to the Post Office I was so THIRSTY I asked the Postmaster for some water and upon delivery, promptly drank 1/2 gallon and was still dehydrated later. Our friend Robert George Freeman (trail name "Junker"), who we met in PA, came to pick us up at Bluemont and gave us a ride back to the Bear's Den. It was good to see him and Sandy and we started to feel a sense of belonging in this AT community, hey, we have friends who will come and get us.

The remnants of hurricane Katrina caused a significant amount of blow down, even of mature, healthy trees, and we crawled around it, marveled at it, and plan to go through a lot more tomorrow as we begin the "roller coaster", some 17 peaks in a row, up and down and up and down. And you are HOT and drenched and sucking water and the next water is, how far? Are we dehydrated yet?

We passed the 1000-mile mark today, 1000 to go and things seem pretty nice in the morning, but we get tired out by 4PM, slogging with the pack straps biting into us; Kim may have poison ivy where her hip belt goes. Kim has some dermatome numbness in her foot as a result of the pack putting pressure on the nerves leading therein. This happened a lot to my SCAs so I believe it is OK or that there will be no permanent damage or consequence.

The hosts fed us a huge meal tonight and we ate it all and then some, left-over Chinese food, ice cream, chocolate pie, gobs of veggies and real macaroni and cheese, on and on, what a thing, to burn that many calories and be able to eat like a hog and still lose weight. I figure to lose myself about a pound every ten miles or maybe 40 to 50 lbs total.

The weight thing is quite the deal. There is much hype and pressure for "ultra light" gear. This gear all costs LOTS of money. Gear is a major topic of conversation. Some fellows you meet that's all they can say: "how heavy is your pack man????", "what's your base weight?", "you need to lighten up", "just wait, you'll see". To a large extent this is true for middle-aged people, weight can wear on you more than it would for a younger person. With me especially, whose knees have been beaten by beastly heavy packs filled with giant first aid kits and Park Service radios, months of trail work, kicking rubble and rocks, ( I have lost 25% of the cartilage in my knees), the weight is a serious issue. We just can't and shouldn't be carrying that much weight yet part of the deal as well is an issue of pure fetish and gear hype. I can carry 35 to 40 pounds OK and even up to 50 pounds is way better than what I did on SCA or otherwise. I don't need to have the lightest of everything as I see that as a complete sell-out to hype. Hiking gear hype is omnipresent and I have to fight the power. I detest hype of all forms. That is something Kim and I have in common. No one can tell us anything, baby. What about my ingenuity with gear? What about my heritage as a pack packer? What about all my old gear? Is the old stuff all of a sudden just no good? What about the days with John with thick green army poncho shelters and number ten cans full of fresh picked apples boiling over coals? Does the entire heritage get tossed for the latest flavor of market pressure? Is there no hearkening to any loyalty to one's past? Is this just more American rabid, unconscious consumerism for the crunchy granola set? There is kind of a herd mentality, you see it, you want it, and you can't stop thinking of it, got to get a Subaru Outback wagon, the Vermont state car, got to get the lightest weight stuff. The hype is insidious and if one is not careful you may find yourself spouting the exact lines placed in your brain by the slick psychologists of market pressure.

The outfitters are all slathering at the mouth to sell the latest products that wick more, that weigh less, that have low odor and that have more sexy bright colors and cost and arm and a leg. They plant doubt in the minds of the impressionable, strike fear of this and that

in the unself-reliant. Hype has always been the bane of the consumer. Fight the power my friends, don't succumb, examine why, and resist the pressure. For example, my high tech shirt is supposed to have silver laden fibers, which are low odor: sorry EMS, I don't think so. Much of this stuff does not even come close to performing as advertised.

And why would one want to really be so light anyway if not for your knees? Could it be that most of the hype is just more goal-oriented, bourgeois yuppie achievement obsession?  The latest gear is just one more thing to accumulate in our acquisitive culture. The latest and lightest bestows a certain status but only if one is ready to bow to those gods. If as a thru-hiker, being super light allows you to thru-hike faster, then OK, if that is what you are doing. All gear has a purpose, for all uses, fishing, hunting, canoeing, biking, skating, horse riding, motorcycle, mountaineering, etc, and fast thru hiking is different than slower thru hiking or base camp back packing. Gear is use-specific. Gear is also a commodity and as Aldo Leopold said, the experience of the outdoors is not about the latest gadgetry, but more about the potential for an internal identification and transformation. It is about clearing your mind out and finding something inspiring in nature. What it boils down to for me is that this outdoors experience of hiking 1000 miles is not about gear; it is about the experience as a whole. The gear is a means to an end, and not the end in itself. I want away from the world of commodities, not to be in the thick of that and comparing my gear to that of other bozos; I'm trying to escape the pettiness of societal and economic inertia, not just out there putting all that crap into another format. 

So I am left to question how much I really need and why, and I will let my knees tell me when things are light enough. I would like to keep going but there is pressure to go sing, and for the computer, so hasta luego mis amigos.

Zombie and La Contessa (our new trail names!)

9/3 Boy, Kimmie fell out of the top bunk this morning with a thud and crashed up against the couch. I thought it was hospital time but she was OK. She is hurting from that and all other pains but stubborn as ever and determined to do at least 3 miles today.

At the shelter of two nights ago we had some duzies, an actual zombie walked by, a homeless guy with nothing, no water, no shirt, nothing and he was like gone to the world. I reminisced about Sean of the Dead, Night of the Living Dead and another fellow who came in later and seemed to be having a heart attack from over-exertion, later tagged me

as "Zombie", because of my enthusiasm in re-enacting some of the classic Zombie scenes. Mose, his trail name was; he was PA Dutch and it was fun to run into a compatriot of sorts. He named Kim La Contessa too, for her Spanish studies and other reasons that emerged out of those moments.

We saw a couple of box turtles on the trail; both badly chewed and scarred but still going. We also have studied the varieties of hickory, which has been fun, and we have gazed over the Shenandoah Valley, cutting new paths into our personal histories, as we retrace routes famous and well worn in American history. This is fun for me, as out west, in the southwest anyhow, it is all Indians, Spanish, Mexico, cowboys, etc, and here it is like: Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Boone, young Lewis and Clark, it is a whole other sort of feeling and history, and our conversation has wandered to the fundamental differences of

Jeffersonian versus Hamiltonian thought, and could it actually be all one way or another? Jeezum Crow, we keep banging up against that one! So off we are to another day. I just finished Kristin Lavransdatter, by Sigrid Undset, and I am still swimming in the life of that book, wow, what a tale! Now I will try Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte to maybe touch some of the 19th century literature that my Dad loved.

The sun shines on the trees and the trail south beckons, until next time, que les vayan bien.

FCA & KDB

AT News # 3   8/13/05   Waynesboro, VA

Wow, there is so much to say and so little time! Little time on the computer that is. We have just arrived in Waynesboro, VA, after completing the Shenandoah National Park in 10 some days and town is more exciting to think about on your way there and much grimier and draining when you get there, especially with no car to go from the Post Office to the laundry, to the supermarket, to the Y for a shower, to the library and we are TIRED and ugly now but finished with most chores except for the final food shop.

There are people called "trail angels", who you can call for rides and for help and we got a ride from one, from Rockfish Gap to the outfitter store. New gear cost a $100, as we are lightening up little by little; we got real rain covers instead of contractor bags and Kim got a lighter stuff sack. From there to town we hitched a ride with a very nice fellow who gave us a backstreets tour of the town and then dropped us at the PO, whereupon we met another guy and it is just one fine interaction after another when you travel at the face to face level, at the face to face speed. The AT is a very social experience and we have enjoyed it very much for that. This is not any sort of solitude of the wilderness experience; it is crammed with people and not really wild, but it is outdoors and it takes some level of commitment and expertise to pull it off.

I have so many things to say...I'll start with "swamp maples". We walked through forests of huge, HUGE trees and I wondered what they were and Kim said "swamp maples", which I later found out to be a bit of a joke on me, as they were poplars. The young ones look sort of like striped maple up north or as we used to call "bum wad maple" back in the day. Maybe there is something to that maple stuff....swamp maples, bum-wad maples, and poplars.  Many trees have been just monstrous, especially the oaks, 10 different varieties, towering, huge, thick trees, majestic, mystical, as well as the hickory, sassafras and maples and speaking of trees, the chestnut is quite a story. In 1910 a blight started which was imported from Chinese chestnuts. Up until that point chestnuts covered 30 to 40% of the Appalachian forest, from Maine south. The wood was as good as redwood for resisting rot and was strong and straight, good for lumber, fence posts, RR ties, shingles, siding and of course its crop, the chestnuts. The nuts were very tasty and their export was one of the centers of the southern Appalachian economy. The blight shut it all down. Southern mountain folkways of life went away with the chestnut. Now there is a society trying to create the tree again, resistant to the blight, involving Norman Borlaug, of green revolution fame, who has a big street named after him in Ciudad Obregon, Sonora, Mexico. I imagine Borlaug is helping the Mexicans to better their crops down in that heavily irrigated coastal Sonoran region. Now chestnuts only grow to bush size out of old roots, and we see them everyday, "look, a chestnut!"

We saw teeny weenie salamanders in a small pool where we got water. It has been dry, very dry, and as we pumped our water, we both looked down into this pool, with all sorts of neat life in it, both fascinated by nature, and our faces reflecting back up. As we hiked north of Shenandoah, the traffic pulsed out of DC as if from some slingshot from Mars; the planes flew over in their flight paths and smog gushed through the mountain passes; there has been precious little complete solitude from civilization, what with the highway noise, people etc. We hike and skirt through the eastern megalopolis, slinking through the edges, and yet we are still out with bears and whip-poor-wills, nighthawks, stick bugs and tree frog ringing choruses at night; when they stop, we know it is around 5:45 AM, or just getting light. Shenandoah National Park is pierced to the heart by the automobile; there are Harleys audible everywhere, hardly wild, even though much is designated wilderness. What is up with that Harley noise thing anyway? Do they think we all want to listen to that? Maybe I can come up with a good phrase like Hardly Saving My Piece of Mind? Hardly a Quiet Moment?

Other wildlife has included other people's multiple sightings of rattlesnakes, at least two of which were killed, which was really unnecessary as the snakes are not aggressive, only defensive; They really just want to mind their own business. Killing snakes is against the law in the Park, and: for an ecosystem to be healthy, it needs it's top predators or the prey becomes out of balance, as in too many deer destroying the Kaibab National Forest in AZ. And as well, for the heck of it, in the Noah story, God said to get two of EVERY LIVING THING, and that they should be fruitful and multiply, and that man should be the steward, not the arbitrary dominator; God didn't say leave out wolves, lions and snakes, and for more heck, Aldo Leopold, the grandfather of outdoor appreciation and ethics, said as much that there is no wilderness, no wild without predators, just a glorified domesticity. The upshot, for me having snakes in my path and bears at night is an acceptable risk, as I want to be a part of nature and not a master that rules with an iron fist. It's kind of a philosophy of surrender to win. You find the magic not through control but through surrender. The game then comes to you. Or maybe as the famous George Hano said, "in sales you have to be willing to take a no", meaning that with no risk, you'll never get any gain. These are just a few of my opinions. And it is interesting, in terms of selective Bible reading, that one of the snake killers quoted the golden rule as his justification for killing the snake, that is how he would want others to do him, kill all the snakes in their path so he would not be endangered....but that is not MY golden rule, so where is the obvious truth then that we may get out of our Bibles? As William Blake said, "both read the Bible day and night, whilst thou readest black and I readest white?"

One night in a shelter was a father and son and the boy was terribly afraid of spiders in the corner and the Dad was just letting him suck it up, and then Kim went over and comforted the boy, by saying how the spider had it's home there, and it was a nice home, and there was no need to kill it, as it would stay there, and eventually she smoothed things over so the boy could sleep and the spider could live, deft work by a professional Mom I'd say. The next morn we saw a big black rat snake up in the rafters, all curled up with its head out one little hole to the outside. That snake scared them all, "you mean we slept with that thing up there all night!" I said, the snake was OK, I just would mind if it came down to offer Kim an apple.

For bears our food must be hung up well in trees or on metal bear poles. Many thru-hikers do not take the trouble to protect their foods adequately and therefore risk creating a food habituated bear, which is then, a dead bear, as it will be killed for it's addiction to human food, as it won't ever stop associating people and food. I see many thru-hikers more as goal-oriented athletes rather than as outdoor enthusiasts or nature appreciators. They worry more about their particular scene and take no time to smell any roses that may be there by the side of the trail. However, some thru-hikers like Gantz are just superfine folks. This AT hiking means many things. We discuss it daily as we run into more and more hikers; the reasons take a multitude of forms. I think in a big part that hiking is an enterprise for the leisure class. This is not an activity you see many minorities in; it is a yuppie pastime, for the well-to-do and I guess that makes me one too or at least a pretender to the leisure lifestyle. We have bought ourselves time, time to enjoy, to reflect, to work hard and see foggy sunrises and dew covered grass, to sweat and sleep well; this is what we are buying. Buying it we are, and in some sense it is a commodity, and we see the folly of other's purchases all the while blind to our own.

Kim is accustoming herself to being filthy dirty and smelling gross, to which she has resisted mightily but now gives in more and more. Living outside for weeks and months on end means a whole different gestalt of things to have to deal with. One of them is persistent dirt, odor, sweat, pain, bugs, dark, etc. It is inconvenient. Yet you do it out of choice, perhaps to temper the spirit with hardship and well-earned joy. Could it be that good things don't come easy? The drone of crickets and frogs at night is a beautiful soporific serenade, soon to be stifled by the incipient coolness of cold and fall and then winter; the leaves are starting to turn and summer is beginning to end.

Some musings about outdoor users: there is a hierarchy of users, with no absolute way to measure who may be at the top or bottom, the point of measurement is always one's own use, which becomes equal to/ confused for the true way, for example, thru-hikers see themselves as the sort of special forces, green berets, Navy SEALS, they are the elite, they get up earlier, hike longer, have less weight (and all seem to have MP3 players, cell phones and super high tech stoves, and then, by extension they are more ascetic, they partake in less sin and slovenliness, less gluttony than oil-eating, coffee drinking heavy  back packers like us. Just as in religion with all the sin stuff or as in weight loss, that fat is equal to sin, gluttony and greed are SIN and deprivation is more holy in the eyes of God, giving in to the pleasures of the flesh is wrong, and along with all of this is a sort of new set of rules called Leave No Trace, which lays out how to be a responsible outdoor user. And the rules are necessary because there are so many who know not, yet at the same time, the rules just make more cops and enforcers. But with no clear lines, then all harm and violation becomes a matter of personal preference and we are thrust into full anarchy, which may be good or not, hence the ease in which true believers find clarity in their views of life, as there is no grey, only black and white, oh how I rant. Anyway, each class of outdoor user sees themselves as at the top of the pile, horse users, hunters, ATV users, hikers, long distance hikers, bikers, weekend warriors, runners, mountaineers, etc. and all these users may become what Elaine Pagels terms "intimate enemies", as they are so fundamentally similar that it is easy therefore to find fault in the differences at the fine point level, as between Christians and Jews, but not between Christians and, say Hindus, as Hinduism is so different there are few obvious fine points to get worked up about. And so we all, all us outdoor users see the folly of the others and go on as if we were the Kings, but it is all perhaps just a matter of preference and a microcosm of the world's problems in people's inability to tolerate difference and then the fighting, war, bigotry, etc, so this is the sort of thing that ruminates in the mind of yours truly as I walk through the woods (many hikers slam Bill Bryson's book as the epistle of an outsider, not of a true backpacker), and, how's that for a run-on paragraph?

I saw very small pool of water in some rock, and then out of nowhere there was a ripple, and I felt it was a sign from my deceased friend Zeke, @ 1956 - 2005, and I thought of "ripple in still water, when there is no pebble tossed, nor wind to blow", could it have been Zeke coming through from the other side? A sign? How would I know? I saw Sirius in the morning, in the dark as we had coffee on top of a mountain, and the Dog Star began to twinkle, could it have been Dad out there, somehow cognizant of me? Was it Dad knowing my mind, and my grandfather too? Dad thought maybe all his relatives were at the North Star. And how else could the dead communicate with us except through our thoughts?  And Dad was a navigator on a B-17; the Dog Star would be a perfect sign to me. I love dogs. I'd love to believe it; I'll take any sign I can get. Om mani padme hum, Dad, the jewel is in the lotus. Toward the end, Dad said, "I've had my days". He lived  @ 31, 326 days.  Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are.

In spite of all the social hubbub on the AT, I had an epiphany one day, where my awareness stretched to include all of life on earth, in the air, water, land, soil and sea; I felt the teeming grace of a planet full of life, precious life, from it's unknown roots to its unknown future, all of life poised in the NOW.  I was life come aware of itself, for one moment the entire continuum of life woke up, conscious, and looked back and reflected upon itself, here on the third rock from the sun, spinning in a vast universe, the indescribable and inexplicable miracle of life, in all it's forms, from my beloved Pleistocene mega fauna to little teeny salamanders in a puddle, past, present and future. It was a nice improvisation, perhaps a grandiose delusion or maybe just congruent with my Quaker background and the notion of mystical thought and continuing revelation.

We met a fellow who has a hostel called Terrapin Station. He was a Grateful Dead guy all the way through. "How many shows did you go to?" he asked, "which was your last show?" We chatted for a good while; he mailed a book for us, as we had forgotten to send it in our rush to catch an unexpected ride out of Front Royal. He talked Kim out of carrying the mace and knife on her belt. He was a very nice guy. And for him I dedicate this snippet of Dead lyrics: "While you were gone, these spaces filled with darkness, with nothing to believe in, the compass always points to Terrapin, sullen wings of fortune beat like rain, we're back in Terrapin, for good or ill again." We meet so many really nice people it is really something to think of, how much I have missed at home by being on automatic pilot and not stopping to chat with strangers, but then, at home, wherever that may be, I do not always have this big, interesting pack, and set of dumpstered ski poles to attract questions from people. "What are you guys doing???????",  "going all the way?", "where did you start?", "I wish I could be doing that too?

Other nice people of note, the folks at Weasel Creek Outfitters, who gave Kim a new waist belt, GAVE, who gave us fuel, watched our packs and were super nice, there was Jocah Beckah, the Christian Science lady, Blazes' parents, who gave us a ride and filled our ibuprofen bottle, and many more. Everyday there are more to fill our saga; we can't even remember them all.

Kim has been hurting still, mostly from ill-fitting boots that have been very hard to break in. She has walked in much pain, and she has stuck with the boots even through my suggestions to just get something new, to ditch them, cut the toes open, but she soaked them in water to loosen them up and has diligently bandaged her little toes, taken numb feet, swollen ankles, and gone onward, to the point of now bursting out in the morning with a quick 6 or 7 miles before snack time. She loves that thrill of exercise and of working her body. When we get to the shelters in the afternoon, and maybe make a fire and chat with the fellow hikers, she is full of life. One of her names: She Who Swims With Sharks, from her deep water swim on Nantucket, out past the surfers, out into white shark water, unbeknownst to her, and it dawned on her, as the surfers looked at her aghast, "What are you doing out here girl?" She knew then that she was maybe out of bounds, but then she perhaps found the exhilaration of true wilderness, of being in the food chain, of life as being a part and not of an unthinking, unconscious dominator of nature. It is the mighty Kimmie, determined to find out a few serious, sincere and significant things in this life.

More ramblings and musings from the trail: in outdoor gear you have branding, Subaru, North Face, Patagonia, Marmot, EMS, REI etc, these brands exist as kinds of economic types that are equivalent to biological types, into the available economic space comes an economic type just as into available biological space comes a biological type that meets those requirements. (For example, saber tooth cats arose three separate times out of three different lineages, because there was the space for a slash and attack predator; the slash and attack predator is a biological type. Certain types of gear meet different economic requirements and are economic types.) It is a kind of supply and demand principle that cuts across economy and biology. The ubiquitous unseen hand of economic determinative forces or evolution itself may drive this process, or whatever hands are out there guiding these large processes.

The outdoor gear brand is an icon, equivalent to the fine differences in for example, sea gull plumage that separate one species from another. The gear all works about as good, but each has a line, a story, a brand, which makes it seem as if it is critically different. Brand is important as an identifier of which species of user one is a member. It is not obvious to me personally that North Face is what I want to be sporting all around as that would put me in a class of top level consumer, which I am not. I prefer REI as that is more of the purchasing level I can afford, and thus, when I meet other REI wearers, I feel congruent with my fictive tribe. I can't front for the most expensive stuff. There are certainly psychologists and people who put a lot of time and money into the IMAGE of gear as much as to its utility. Does form follow function? Well, if the function is also to identify one as a top level consumer, then the image, i.e., the HYPE, creates a fantasy that then influences how the person perceives his or her gear. It is a sort of way of creating membership in a world of individuals, who can then join fantasy tribes and belong to something, when all the old tribalism and village life has devolved into individuals all in their own relative cubicles. These may be the musings of a wild and uncultivated anthropologist!

Apropos of all of that, I am glad to have been a part of some of the very same things that I rant about above, of some large cultural sweeps that could be seen cynically as hype, but that I enjoy being a member of. In my days have come my favorites, Jerry Garcia, Michael Jordan, Star Trek, Clint Eastwood, and I've touched other big sweeps like Baroque music, Quaker simplicity and mysticism and the Anabaptist search for religious freedom.  In all cases there is a hero level expression, George Fox, Menno Simon, Dick Kelty (or in economics and advertising: iconic branding and fetishization of certain merchandize as of higher intrinsic value) of what normal people cannot do, but that the hero does superhumanly.  I like my heroes; I guess as well I should. That is my own self-hype. I'd just prefer to do it my self, to make my own choices than to have it forced on me, but then I recall Kim and I walking down the trail ruminating on free will, can there be free will, is there always some sort of determinism? Into the vacuum of our desires and wants must heroes and brands fall? This can get to be like beating a dead horse, but I feel there is choice at some levels and I want to be prepared to make those choices that are available to me. I guess I just can't buy the hype, "well son, you can get the cheap shit made in China but it will fail quickly and you'd be better off buying this here Feathered Friends sleeping bag for $500." That is strangely like "well son, you can cut your own path, but you'd be more successful should you get a PhD and be a stockbroker or a lawyer or a doctor." Somehow it gets to be all about exteriors and the teller doesn't see the interior aspects. A type seems to have no status with no iconic exterior. Then we must ask, is this status really worth pursuing?

I'll return to the people we meet: we are constantly meeting new and interesting people!, interesting people, curious people, full of questions. We are like stars or something, celebrities. They see us as special, "wow, real hikers Madge!". We are the real thing in comparison to weekend warriors. (Yet we are mere section hikers compared to thru-hikers.) But, to engage all these folks we meet takes a LONG TIME, and with our packs on we end standing there and being weighted down, and then we lose our momentum, get more tired, but it is so worth it to take advantage of this pace of life and of the face to face quality. I chatted for an hour yesterday with two young Mexican men at the laundry, and we had a great time, they said my Spanish was still good and I got to hear what life was like for them in VA. Kim met a homeless woman and was given books.  Kim met a woman farmer; Kim got us a ride with some old guy who she had eating out of her hand in minutes, on and on.

We stayed at a campground one night, an automobile type campground in Shenandoah NP, a place generally dominated by the automobile and motor-recreation set, and as the evening set in, fumes of lighter fluid and charcoal smoke filled the air, and a campground cacophony ensued, with dogs, kids, radios, engines and this constitutes an outdoor experience for many urban dwellers, but sometimes to me it seems a hellish expression of rube and uneducated abuse of the outdoors. Having previously admitted and laid out my own hypocrisy in this matter, the reader will have to excuse my opinions, as that is all they are. These campers just don't seem to have been brought up in a way that shows any knowledge or respect for outdoor resources, or of how to handle oneself around wildlife for that matter. The whole place was abuzz with major bear fear. People are keyed up to a very high degree by fear of the unknown nature of the black bear. Is there risk out there with claws and teeth and it's own volition? No more just Fate of an undetermined nature, as in a car accident, now it moves, it writhes, it's breath smells of death and consumption. You see huge knives, dogs chained to picnic tables, bells around ankles, huge cans of grizzly pepper spray, and it is humorous really, as the bears don't want any people, just an easy hit on unprotected food. It's not like back into the Stone Age or She Who Swims With Sharks, the situation is tame; it is a campground. The classic scene I saw was a guy with kids, a baby and wife, spreading cream cheese on his bagel with a 10" Bowie knife. The kids were busy tearing branches off of trees for a fire. And so there I sit in judgment when we had to tear off a few branches one night to make room for our tent in a precious flat spot. Low impact ethics say to only take down and dead wood, never to remove branches from trees. Kim said it; I've said it; each one has to judge where they themselves stand on low impact camping. We know that a man can justify anything, even killing another man, so the whole spectrum of low impact ethics necessarily runs into problems of interpretation and convenience. Not all can hew to the same line; so then I must eat crow and allow others the freedom to make their own way just as I stubbornly cling to my own volition and freedom. I must allow others to behave in ways I find objectionable because 1; I don't want to be a cop, 2: you can't tell people how to be or force change on them unless they themselves are ready to make that change, 3: there is no real ultimate harm, nature will recover and concentrated campground/ shelter use is better for the masses, that is an acceptable use for the masses, and why can't the masses be the masses? 4: education about the supposed validity of my beliefs may best occur in a non-judgmental context where people might explore issues without being told they were pendejos.

Well, this has been rushed, without time to polish up all the prose and ideas. This is the raw stuff, straight from the mind of Fred Allebach. I'll close with a run down of our morning routine, now into our 4th week on the trail. At 5:30AM one of us arises and goes to get the food off of the bear pole or off of the food line put into a tree, (at least 10' up and 4" out), upon getting the food bags down, you get the burner out of the stove bag and put it on the fuel bottle and start the coffee water, you wind up the food rope, it is still dark and stars are all out, meanwhile the other person is rolling up the sleeping pads, stuffing the sleeping bags, clearing out the tent and then the water is done and we have 1 cup together as we watch the day come, and listen to whip-poor-wills call, then it starts to get light, the tent comes down, oatmeal is made from the rest of the hot water, packs are packed some, more coffee dranken, (from the gallery of wasted past participles!), feet are bandaged, boots put on, teeth brushed, everything loaded and then we stretch for a bit, maybe let nature  call, look at our maps and books to plan the day and then, about 1.5 to 2 hours later, we roll 'em out. Water for coffee had been gotten the night before, as well as drinking water pumped up, so we have our water ready. The site is checked for dropped gear, maybe some of other's trash is picked up and our work awaits, 10 miles, maybe 13, maybe eat some wild apples on the way, and the we start it all over, on our way to Georgia. We also now discover the South, and what a different world this is to Vermont or Tucson. Whatever it all is, we aren't in Kansas anymore.

Fred

AT News #4  Daleville, VA

Wow, here I am at a truck stop, after walking a half hour on free way interchanges past anonymous disembodied animal arms, busted blinker lights, beer cans, etc, and then through giant yards of idling semis only to get lost and finally make it to a pay computer. It is hard to bring you the news! This computer is Paleolithic, and next to an ashtray full of cigarette butts and peanut shells are all on the floor. Why do people who walk suck the dregs of city life? Well, because we can't drive to any place nicer; we have to take what is close, what we can get to.

The other night we met a southern woman who said her name was Mary Lynn. Kim heard "Mary Leeian" and  she said "what?", the woman said Mary Leeyian, until we finally figured out Leeyian was actually Lynn.....Kim also says to those who may be concerned, that the ginseng collecting guys out here are cute. They get $450 a pound dry for ginseng collected in the local forests. They camp in tents and have tattoos, maps etc. They are doing fun stuff and there is an element of danger and adventure to them. Kim's feet are all better and her ankle is on he mend but now my feet are on the fritz. I had to cash out my boots, got new ones and the new insoles cut my feet, took all the toe room away and gave me plenty of opportunity to complain. Kim however, gets going when the going gets tough, and she performs beyond the call of duty by stepping up and taking care of business, like getting up at 5:30AM in the dark to make coffee, or just doing all the things a good outdoor leader would do. I give Kim very high marks for toughness and compassion. She calls me jefe, Spanish for "boss", but this is her trip to lead, she is the chef, French for jefe. My personal trail name for her is Cheffy.

It has been dry and so we get water where we can, carrying a full boat and many times cooking dinner at the mid day when we find available H2O to cook and clean up. The days grow shorter and there is less time to hike. We've made steady 13 mile days and we take time to check the views and smell the roses. We liked the view from High Cock Knob. The other day we saw a 100 year old standing dead chestnut, and then later some actual chestnut trees with nuts; that was a treat. Those I later found out were probably chinquapin trees. We like getting the sense of history as we roll through. Kim reads the books at night and I have been furiously trying to finish Wuthering Heights, and find out Heathcliff's fate, and then to get a new book while we're in town. We sometimes burn the finished pages to keep weight down; see you later Heathy boy. 

I continue to mull over the whole gear scene and have realized that it will never be good enough. It never is good enough. There will always be new stuff coming out to make the old stuff obsolete. There will always be pressure to get the current line of goods. The fate of all gear is to first be highly coveted and then to go to the bone yard. In the evolution of gear and technology there is a trajectory towards progressive ease. Who wouldn't want a Dutch Oven compared to cooking with hot rocks in a leather sack? The ease gets us every time. It's natural to go for technology that makes life easier. In this we are no different from anyone else. So then, lighter weight gear has to be desirable, as we don't want to waste time and energy hauling bowling balls around. Yet we need the wherewithal to consume this new gear and hence, the rat race to accumulate funds to buy it and so on and so forth.

Since people like ease over difficulty, this may explain why hikers cut off switchbacks on the trail. The switchbacks are there to prevent erosion and to prolong the life of the trail, for the benefit of all over time. The ease of a person's own self-interest, i.e. cutting off a switchback, then trumps any notion of the collective good. Why put one's self out? Especially when there are no cops around to bust you? Many switchbacks are terribly cut off, ugly and eroded and this by supposed outdoor appreciators. Which just goes to show there are knuckleheads in any crowd. So.... what I may be seeing with all this gear stuff as HYPE, as I try to invoke some sort of anti-capitalist rant, may be nothing more than human nature itself, to go for the easiest way, and they who provide that do nothing more than play to our natural instincts for ease and comfort. I think as well that most problems today stem from our nature itself, not from white men, or capitalism, or Western civilization. Human problems reside within us all and they always have, much as we want to be the victim of another.

We camped by the Tye river one night, a Southern supply and escape route during the last years of the Civil War. We swam with minnows and fish; the minnows seem so friendly and curious as they clean the hairs on your body. The next day we climbed The Priest, 3000' in 4 miles, to 4063' and then to Spy Rock, another Civil War place of note. After a zero day in Montebello we were off to Hog Camp Gap, a very nice spot in an open field, with swings and another big Kimmie fire. Around were stonewalls made by slaves, to keep in the hogs while they were fattening on acorns and chestnuts. The herders camped in our spot and brought in the animals with salt, hence the name of Salt Log Gap.  We went over Cold Mountain in a dense fog where the outer world closed in and inner worlds opened up as fog drifted in and by. I could hear the last of the Mohicans say "we were here". All of the gone and forgotten spirits whispered the same "we were here".  Kim and I then said, "We were here".

Fall is here. The weather has turned quite cold at night now. COOOOLD! Whoa, back up that donkey train, this is the SOUTH eh? As we walk by, views of individual leaves are striking. The colors and shapes are as good as sea shells, various as snowflakes, the intricate patterns are constantly changing, endlessly, the colored acorns, red, yellow, green, brown, are gems in nature's jewelry box, leaves of all colors, "look!", as I recall the medieval "doctrine of similitudes", that all of this unity of pattern in nature must be evidence of God's creation; and then, into rhododendron forests whose shapes resemble inverted mangrove roots, as I snorkeled by with schools of tropical fish; could this unity of pattern have a larger meaning? I guess I'll never really know. No class will tell me. But my curiosity is grand, maybe the falconer will release me one day, and I won't be pulled back on the tether of what it means to be human. ("In the end human thought accomplishes so little. It's wings are strong, but not as strong as the destiny which gave them to us. It will not let us escape nor reach any further than it desires. Our journey is predestined and, after a brief roaming which fills us with joy and expectation, we are drawn back again as the falcon is drawn back by the leash in the hand of the falconer. When shall we attain liberty? When will the leash be severed and the falcon soar into the open spaces?

-When? Will it ever be? Or is it not the secret of our being that we are and always will be bound to the hand of the falconer? If this were changed then we would cease to be human beings and our fate would not longer be that of humanity.

The Dwarf, Par Lagerkvist, 1945, p.53

The buzz continues big time about bears and snakes. Man o' man are there fears! Phew!  I see that any animal that can threaten your mortality has more mojo than ones that don't. The more your mortality may suffer, the more mythological the mojo. We don't need  archetypes to explain animal powers, just look at the mojo on the mortality scale. After mortality is considered the rest are mere parlor games. I stepped right over a copperhead by the James River and Kim saw it afterwards. It never moved.  I believe I have cultivated good snake karma and thus, the snake animal masters will protect us, that snake was frozen. It didn't move 1 centimeter. Was it the falconer watching us and protecting? Was it the Artist painting us in to more adventures without being bitten?

An interesting part of doing the AT: it is like a pseudo religious pilgrimage. There are many similarities with Mexicans going to a shrine hundreds of miles away, carrying charms, finding miracles, getting the help of strangers, having a cause or purpose. On the AT there are "trail angels" and there is "trail magic". You get asked, "why are you doing the trail?" Well, you start to wonder, why? Is it just to get from point A to point B or is there some inner aspect to it similar to a real pilgrimage? And I wonder why we are doing anything? Maybe the wind kind of pushed me this way? Does anyone ever say, "why are you working at K-Mart?"  It does seem that the AT has aspects of a pilgrimage. It is a peculiar passage that many take at certain times of their lives to perhaps find some clarity. People leave behind the old and maybe look for something new. Maybe modern life is hollow to such an extent that actually relating to people one by one is a revelation! The AT contains possibilities for new beginnings and for some sorts of transformations to happen to us. The pilgrimage part is that you have to get out here and walk to find it. Putting in the miles, walking from here to there is the pilgrimage. That is the exterior part of it. What you find inside while you are walking is perhaps the jewel of the whole affair.  Why am I at a truck stop pecking this out? Well, some things we may never know. We are on a journey quite similar to a pilgrimage, there is that sense. Who can say now what the end will bring?

The Canadian geese are going this way too. We are tuned into the great round of the seasons. WE walk the same path  of the great migrations. The morning sky glows and twinkles on but tonight it will be Mexican food and showers and laundry and all the comforts that money can buy. And this will do it for this edition of the AT News.

FCA

AT News #5  10/12/05  Pearisburg, VA, near end of 7th week, 460 miles hiked, 640 to go, FCA lost 20 pounds in 2 mos., FCA has poison ivy in the rear, oh man!@$#@$%^$.

We are staying at the Holy Family Church hostel, at which Father Pernelli is quite the character. Kim went on a dump run with him

yesterday and today I had coffee with him; I asked him, "what did Pope

John Paul mean when he said 'truth cannot contradict truth'?" and the

Father told me that whatever is in God's creation cannot contradict

itself. I had previously asked about astronomy and scientific truth and

how the Pope squared that with Catholic truth, the Father made a nod

to that the church's teaching is more in a moral dimension. I mentioned

William Blake's quote:"...both read the Bible day and night, whilst thou

readest black while I readest white..." and the Father said, "that is

going in next week's sermon!"  Kim is now off at Wal-Mart, Family

Dollar, Save-A-Lot, Stupor Shave, the PO and I am cut loose to write

from the pleasant surroundings of this library.

Our hostel is on the site of a slave cemetery/ graveyard and we have a

smashing view of the mountains we just came out of. For 7 days we were

up in the clouds, fog and rain, slogging on with squishing boots and with the wet chafing of nylon fabrics on our legs, with more blisters from wet sox and with amazing foot stench. It was tough to get going in the morning in serious downpours. That was attitude stifling, but we made it through.  We made it yes we did. The fog was tremendous, Jurassic Parky, Lord of the Ringsy, elfin, mystical, curtains separating the known from the unknown.... We stopped at a memorial to Audie Murphy, the most decorated WW2 veteran, near where his plane crashed into the mountain and we took off our hats and I sang Two Soldiers, at Kim's request, and we then moved on in the rain. I touched Dad's dog tag that I have on while I sang, in remembrance of the

service of the greatest generation.

Kim has continued to be real good as the trip leader. On this section

we did not have enough food and she picked apples and made apple

stew while insisting that I have the lion's share of the good stuff.

She has carried 20 pounds of water for miles into a dry camp. She gets

after the real needs of the program in such a way that I see she would

indeed be a perfect trip leader for any sort of outdoor enterprise. She

is tough, well planned, uncomplaining, stoic, yet sensitive to other's

needs. She steps up to serve and she is good at it. Kimmie gets my vote

as trip leader of the year! This is not just shameless aggrandizement

of my baby; I see that she IS really good at this. She wants it and she

is creating it. I see somebody who is stepping up to the job in all ways.

Of note, one day we were walking along and took a short break to allow

our shoulders to decompress from the crushing weight of our beastly heavy burdens. I looked up and saw a pit bull, an Akita cross, a pit

bull/ hound cross and another black dog, all with their hackles up and

looking quite menacing. Then there were three shady looking guys

yelling and grabbing at the dogs to get them under control, yelling loud, and they then passed us looking very guilty and we have later surmised that they were pot growers, or perhaps ginseng poachers, clearly guys who were out on errands of no good. They were our first Bubbas! To me they are way scarier than snakes or bears. I had my walking stick ready, as if that would have done anything.

As we came into Pearisburg, there was a factory that makes fibers,

including cigarette filters and this factory was grinding out the

noise, smoke and light like some sort of giant alien ship of

industrial civilization. For 10 miles or more away we heard this low roar, coupled with the noise of semi trucks on the freeway and trains and we then passed an industrial waste dump that accepts dioxin sludge and there were signs on the creeks saying DON'T DRINK THE WATER, and we then crossed a huge bridge over the New River (purportedly the second oldest river in the world after the Nile), and we were then at Wade's Foods.

When I first get to town I am assaulted by noise and it gets me very

edgy. It throws me off my center, even though I want what town has to

offer. At Wades, I went in and got a yogurt drink, a bag of cheesy popcorn, a bag of lemon pepper foil packed tuna and a banana. Kim got a dinner with 2 Salisbury steaks, corn, 2 biscuits, potatoes, a side of potato salad, a half gallon of OJ and a banana. And we ate it all as we sat right on the sidewalk outside the store, as customers gave us a wide berth. And we, being so lost in our hunger and deprivation from the last 7 days of wet starvation did not care one whit, happy as two peas in a pod to be gorging on our delicious grub. I also got a paper, a disappointing paper that was full of all ditsy local news and sports and not one word about NBA basketball, not one word! Then Kim called the hostel, got a hold of a ride, who came and took us also to the PO to get our package of food. And Kim forwarded our bump-packages along and then we were dropped at the hostel for showers, unpacking and decompressing. Kim went to the dump with the Father. Then we walked 40 minutes back into town, did laundry, had to wash 1 load twice it was so dirty, then to a dollar store, got a gallon of whole milk, cans of veggies and corn, got caught in a rain storm, walked back to hostel with clean clothes in the dark, got lost, made dinner, grubbed down and went to bed at 11 PM. We were up early today for coffee with real milk and that brings me back to NOW.

There is an aspect of this town stuff that is tremendously compelling

but also that is my own biggest challenge. I like town the least of everything on the AT as it is so tremendously inconvenient to have to walk so far for things I am used to having be easy to get to or do, and plus you get pushed out of the way by cars, can't talk because of semi-truck noise, have dogs jumping out at you every street. You walk through all the worst trash and it is a sort of voluntary poverty; it is a whole new view of America, on foot. Let me back to woods! This being on foot, it is my choice, yes, and I need town, I am not divorced from civilization, but this is what it is like to be homeless, everything is more difficult. I can see how this being homeless and on foot would beat a guy down and whatever sunshine he had would be

progressively clouded over in bitterness. It's Maslow's hierarchy of needs, if you have to struggle for food and shelter, you can't get to any higher levels of self-actualization. This experience is showing me something about what it really means to be poor, as the AT life is minimal and on the edge of society, creeping around the edges of town, kept to the side, in the bushes, walking, no one in cars has to face you. You are a faceless, grubby, dirty and needy person, at the mercy of others, so thank you, trail angels, for taking care of us!

When we are buying things for our next leg, we run into a paradox. We

want to make a good buy but bulk purchases give us too much stuff and

too much weight. Two forces go against each other, economy of funds and

economy of weight. At one point when we had too much food weight we just parked it in the woods and took a zero day to eat off some food and enjoy the tranquility of the particular spot. This last time we had only a beer and chips store to get food at, and we balked at the small packages of nuts and the general paucity of goods and we did not get enough, hence our hunger over the last 7 days; we refused to buy the bad buys, we went hungry; but now we get a good buy and we carry the weight! As Mike Lesem says, "by the time we're done, we'll know what we're doin'". It's hard to get the goods right, the proportions, the cost, the taste; it is a science and my leader is doing very well to analyze this all and to provide for what we both know is the most important thing of the day, good food and a lot of it.

Kim and I are constantly wondering why people are doing the trail, who

they are etc. and here are some musings about that: A lot of the crowd

are recent college grads (who somehow are independent of Mom yet have

not learned how to do their own dishes at hostels). There are also a

fair number of late twenties people who have no kids, nor a house and are between careers or jobs. There are people who are in their late

fifties who are done with kids and mortgages and who are not after

accumulating retirement nest eggs. There are not so many Kim's and my

age. I suppose we are taking our "retirement" when we still have the

bodies to do something with the time.... And all this walking around town

is good homeless training should we never get retired and be having to

tread dollars on the Hampster cage wheel of hand to mouth living at the

lower ends of dinero-ville. The twenty-somethings seem to make up the

huge bulk of the AT population and they are sort of a tribe. They have

similar gear, similar sorts of styles: cell phones, lots of pot, MP3

music players, super light weight gear; the other general groups on the

trail are a bit more diverse.

Why do people do the trail???????? Do they do it to find something? Do they want to escape from something? Is it because it's fun and a challenge? Is it because it's there? Are we all in the same boat? Are we all equal? Mechanical Man said we all are equal on the trail and in the same boat and this is true to an extent as we all are doing

the same thing, walking the same path and as Kim's Mom Betty says, "all

of us have to put our pants on in the morning". There are none who are

beyond being human. So in a sense we are all on the same journey, just

like Muslims who go to Mecca. We all must travel the same basic routes

to get there and use the same basic styles of transportation, YET, the

REASONS WHY are different even though the activity is the same. I see

it as kind of like the way Joseph Campbell described the Hero's

Journey or the way Jung shed light on universal archetypes, there are

some real similarities in the human experience over-all, but the fine

shades seem to make worlds of difference. Inside each head is a whole

other universe, similar but ineffably different. The exterior trail is the same trail for all but how it unfolds inside is not the same for all.

One thing in common about the AT is that it is a matter of choice. No

one is out here because they are poor or have to be. We figure it is

about $1000 a month, and that is inexpensive compared to those who

drink, who stay at hotels every town and who buy the high dollar,

lightweight dehydrated foods. So, doing the AT is a choice and it is

somewhat of an unusual choice. For example there are less than 100

south bound thru hikers this year. Less than 100 IS unusual compared to

290 million Americans. (North bounders are a different story.) This

unusualness coupled with the choice aspect makes it qualitatively

different than why someone is working at Kmart. Doing the AT is not

just the regular inertia of life. In fact, it takes a good deal of work just to disengage oneself from regular life even to be able to start doing this. (And then we are like the voluntary homeless!) It seems to me to have some real similar aspects to a religious pilgrimage, with the deprivation, hardship, chance for enlightenment, and the acknowledged boon of spiritual awareness spoken of by the Holy Fathers of the Outdoors, John Muir and Aldo Leopold. Even though the AT might not be actual "wilderness", where we are in the food chain, the quiet and depth of seemingly endless forest and nature does grow on you and does change you and does clear out the cobwebs of all the rat race type of stuff that can occupy a guy's mind. There is a boon of internal peace that can be gotten out in the woods, especially during a real long stay. It grows on you and the depth of it becomes apparent by negative contrast, by how nasty town then appears, by how foolish petty everyday life seems.

The AT seems also to have an inherent goal of completion built in. You

can do it all at once or in sections. Once you get going, there is a

certain pull to do it all, to get to the top, to have been there, done

that and gotten the T-shirt. It is all these things yet at the same

time it is just life. This is not some sort of other dimension of life.

We are still human; still have to put our pants on and just like life,

there is a developmental aspect, where young folks don't do their

dishes and middle aged folks have different understandings and

challenges and the older ones are different yet, just because of where

we all stand relative to our journey from the cradle to the grave. So I

can make some generalizations about life and in general that will also

apply to the AT, but there will be no direct conformity, just as all of

the human sciences and all of great literature can only approximate

what it might be to say "this is what it means to be human". This is Fred's endless chatter; it is this, that, jaws flapping to pass away the time, jaws flapping to engage the questions and fascinations of life and maybe a pearl of wisdom might fall out every now and again.

The AT can be a grind, just like work, one might get tired of being

outside all the time, having to push away and knock off endless miles

by foot. Some of it is about HOW you are doing it and that devolves

into gear discussions, equivalent to the old high school debates about

who is better, Clapton or Santana or Jerry Garcia? There are no answers

to some things and these are perhaps the most heated debates. As they

say about academic type arguments, they are so heated precisely because

the stakes are so low. There can be a fantasy aspect; you get a new

name, you climb mountains called the Dragon's Tooth, you could actually

die if you fell off that cliff over there; your imagination works all day and night; you encounter what is outside at the same time that you have endless hours to be subject and object to nothing more than the eternal internal dialogue of your own thoughts. "If I had 9 million dollars, which of my former SCA students would I give $100,000 to?" Yet for all the hullabaloo that whips through my mind like so much wind, we are never that far out there that we can't just bail out. Civilization

remains close. We are not in Alaska, nor remote Utah nor Idaho; we hear

the grinding away down in the valleys; we lust after chocolate cake; we get ourselves good treats when we arrive in town!

We bring a boon of the wild to town as well. Kim carried back pounds of fresh, tasty wild apples about 10 miles, from an abandoned orchard we found in the mist, hopefully for a pie tonight!  Whatever gain the AT might give you, it seems to be immaterial in nature; you can't buy what the AT offers at a store, you have to earn it by your sweat, time and

endurance, by being here and doing it. Or, as Kim pointed out, in her

wonderful ability to juxtapose and challenge every thought I might

have, the trail might show you that you actually WANT material things

and this outdoors, this ineffable and inscrutable possible transformation, is really not your cup of tea.

Some say "hike your own hike", like any perennial philosophy type of

truth, ("only you can open the door"), as a warning against working against congruence with one's own bliss, one's own fascinations and styles. Be who you are. Why of course be who you are! It is a trap to operate out of the motivations of another, out of peer pressure, parental pressure, out of a desire to conform. Hike your own hike, yet so many here put on the pressure to be a sheep, to do it this way and not that. Hike your own hike, and respect others who

do their own. And that brings us right back to basic humanity; the AT is no different; follow your own path on this well-worn path of life. We are all on the same trail yet each is at the crux of their own little universe. Are you well hydrated? Got a good night's sleep? Well fed? Relationship OK? These sorts of basic self-care type of things are

going to influence how a person perceives that glorious fog. Is it a

pain? Is the view necessary? Are you an asshole just because I am

dehydrated? I guess it's just a kaleidoscope of stuff continually shifting around; that's what it is!

Underlying for me, and I think others, is the sense of wanting to be

transformed, to find something new, something special, to find the gold

ring in a sea of ordinary life, to make one's own time be of value and

of worth. I don't want to be just treading water, spinning my wheels,

this life must be MORE somehow, yet constantly advancing behind me is

complacency and the taking for granted of what I have. It is hard to

keep a carpe diem type of awareness going all the time, but therein

lies the edge, and behind the veil of the edge lies the potential for

transformation.

We both have enjoyed greatly the rhododendron thickets and forests,

deep green, dark, shadows, usually in streams of slightly tannin water,

hidden spaces, dark, mystical, with laurel and azalea growing at the edges of the rhododendrons. Some of our best campsites have been in these areas.

The actual trail itself was quite good when under the jurisdiction of

the Potomac Appalachian Club. That lasted down to the bottom of

Shenandoah National Park after which the local trail clubs have done

little maintenance and there doesn't seem to be the leisure-class base

of people (as around the Washington DC area) to just go out and

volunteer to work. Some of the trail has been an amazing rocky road,

slipping, sliding, ankle turning, downright BAD. The old CCC work was

great to behold up in Shenandoah and points north of there.

We are now entering into hunting season, and the deer are on the move.

We have taken our best precautions by getting bright orange fabrics to

festoon the outside of our packs with. It is unnerving that somebody

might just shoot you because you happen to be moving in the woods. I

can't believe that someone would shoot without seeing what it was that

was actually moving, but we know it happens. They are out there. Who

are they, that shoot without seeing?  We have been under the

attack of a smaller but more fearsome predator nonetheless; foot odor

bacteria, the dreaded stinky foot. Today we bought a bottle of tea tree

oil to put drops of on our boot insoles, to combat this

ever-encroaching rot. It can be surprisingly bad, that stinking odor,

phew! And it then gets in your sleeping bag. You begin to stink in the heat and humidity. That is a real badge of membership; you are one of the stinky tribe.

Here is a belated breakdown of Waynesboro, VA, a town we found at once

to be very friendly yet very strange. We wondered, are these people so

friendly because of some sort of southern hospitality? Well, no. We

discovered that all that is southern is not all that is hospitable, yet

Waynesboro seemed to be trying very hard to impress. Kim asked, could

it be the role of religion in everyday life in the South and how that

impacts the perceived sense of friendliness compared to people in the

northeast, who are generally perceived to be a bit cooler? In

Waynesboro, God and Jesus were right up front, whereas in the Upper

Valley of VT and NH, or in NY, it is not so overt. Waynesboro is

seemingly well integrated in public, with Mexican, Black, Oriental and

White all mixing, yet we found out later that neighborhoods are very

segregated and hardly any Blacks live in Waynesboro at all. The

Mexicans all live in one trailer park. We suspected that the place

might be infected by a sort of Stepford Wives type of disease, where

they seek to get you in their houses and then transform you into an

automaton who then sucks in other hikers. (I have noticed that all sorts of situations in life are like the Stepford Wives, where the necessity and pressure of conforming drives behavior and those who resist are either co-opted or become outcasts. Cops are created by rules that must be conformed to, mindlessly sometimes, and the louder your wheel squeaks, the more cops you have on you.) The highly religious nature of Waynesboro life is on the face of it very friendly but it inevitably leads to an invitation to a church and a talk about the true meaning of the scripture. You know, here is my rant: if somebody can't produce a card signed by God, that they are

on the TRUE pipeline, what gives them any sense that they are really

any closer to understanding cosmic life than me???? Why would not my concepts and understandings be equally valid, especially in the absence of any sort of concrete proof and especially since I am part of a religious mystical tradition as well? Why can't I just say to these folks, "I am a Quaker" and have that be OK? This is just more dead horse beating on my part now, but I have put in many hours beating this horse, so a little more won't hurt. I thought perhaps the local denominations were competing to get hiker converts, which church can reel in the most hikers? Hikers are coming they know, and the YMCA gives you free camping and showers, the library is right there, the PO is next and then all you can eat oriental food, where they maybe put in ingredients to turn you into a zombie, and then hikers are made into broccoli cashew beef dishes.... We just couldn't figure out Waynesboro. It was seemingly great, yet there were drug problems and gangs. There was a tremendous facade, people actually running out their doors to invite us in, to come back, to give us rides; how could any town be that nice all together if it was not some sort of sinister, weird conspiracy? Could we, as cold-blooded Yankee northerners, just not have understood when we saw a gift horse in the mouth? Could I, as  a car driver, not really understand about horses and beating dead horses and looking at gift horses? Kim is about as sincere and nice a person as you would ever meet and she was suspicious of Waynesboro. That

is like a canary in a coal mine. When Kimmie is suspicious look out.

And to boot Waynesboro has the only lycra manufacturing plant in the

USA, a former DuPont facility, that gave us our inevitable industrial

grinding noises that seem to go along with trips to town. As we camped

by a sweltering, post industrial branch of the Shenandoah River,

migrating south ourselves, the Canadian geese honked in the dark as

they ate radioactive frogs and algae, more visitors to the beckoning

but strange hospitality of Waynesboro, VA. And VA has dragged on now

for a LONG time, we have maybe 200 some miles still to go; Team Caboose

is on its way. We figure we will be the last of the south bounders to

get to Springer Mountain, in mid-December.

I am now on my way back to the hostel to clean up and get my stuff

ready to hike tomorrow, hopefully a few more showers with oatmeal soap

will cool out this poison ivy and Kim will arrive back with all sorts

of goodies to eat; she said she wanted to "play house" at the hostel

and make us a knock out dinner, make apple pies and that she is fully capable of doing, inventive and great cook that she is. I am the faithful appreciator of her culinary creations, and she likes it well that I always do the dishes.

More later, Fred

10/31/05 Damascus, VA

Well, it got cold, very cold, frozen cold, sleet, snow, hail, wind, slush, mud, frozen boots cold. It started I guess around a week ago or a bit more. The cold air came drifting in from the top of my bag at night, like liquid ice, down inside, curled up, hat on, heavy sox on, all my clothes on, rain suit on, frosty breath outside the bag and what this all necessitated was a big fire. At Partnership Shelter, next to the Mt. Rogers visitors center, I went out into that cold and made a honkin', rip roaring fire, started with one of my trusty fire starters made of paraffin wax, drier lint and cardboard egg carton. I dragged in lots of wood, wood that was wet and cold and rotten but I burned it anyway, as a good Flying Cloud trained guy would. Before long I put on some really big wood and cranked that fire to the largest levels possible until there was a bed of embers which would consume anything. The whole afternoon and evening, hikers coming through and staying all gathered round and warmed up to the fellowship that only a fire can bring. It was there that we met Buddha, a delightful guy who Kim and I both liked very much. We ended up spending many days hiking with Buddha and now he has gone, but he's not forgotten. I said to Kim, "can we keep him?" Kim says that Buddha and I must be separated at birth, as we are so much alike and you know, every now and then you do meet someone who you can really strike up a good friendship with, and sometimes then, that person is taken down the river of life and your friendship may be like the contents of an acorn from a mighty oak, that for a twist of fate, it just doesn't get to show what it can do. Nice knowing you Buddha, we'll see if there may be more.

At Partnership shelter, Kim and I had planned to stop and take in the exhibits at the visitor's center and ask questions about trees, animals etc. but it was Sunday and they were closed. So we hemmed and hawed and since it was so cold and the next shelter so far away, we decided to stay anyway. Then I built the fire. The next day we decided to zero again, to one: hole up in the savage weather and two, for me to hitch into Troutdale and get our food drop. I went out there that next day and stood for an hour, thumb out in the wicked wind and snow before a minister in an RV stopped for me. He was a very nice fellow and we had a lively chat before he dropped me at the PO some 20 miles away. At the PO I met a Korean War and Vietnam veteran who took me under his wing and offered to take me back up the hill and shopping also. He was a really nice guy and was concerned about how we would do in the weather. He was entirely present for me and we talked about Iraq, WW2, among other things. He said we would never win another big war because the country had lost all its steel manufacturing capability; it had all gone to China and overseas. And then there I was back in the woods with shipped food, bought food, OJ and chocolate milk for Kim and the whole day before us. Now I could go to the center and ask about trees. That night another hiker came in late, named Moosetracks.

The hiker names are pretty fun. At first we were outsiders looking in, wondering what it all meant. Why this, how that? It was all so curious to us and we were so impressionable. Now we have been transformed; we're in the book; we're part of the story; we're written in there in the logs and journals, we have friends a month ahead of us who we read about daily. Now we're on the inside looking out. We've mastered this way of living. We have become part of the flow of the southbound hikers, of the section hikers, of the towns, the woods, the sky, the wind. It is no longer "like the Canterbury Tales" it is the Canterbury Tales. I've named hikers and a hiker named me. Some hiker names of note: Blaze, Tugboat, Little Debbie (a young man), High Mountain, (who I also named the Gas Giant and who Kim named Red Ledge), Brukra, Grey Beard Beaver, T. Rex, the Candyman, Mechanical Man, Gantz, Uphill Bob, Wanderer, Freddy Bear, High Pockets, Captain Nemo, Mr. Pink, The Hemlock Muppet, Walking Stick, Junker, Bugsy and me: Zombie, and Kim: La Contessa. Kim got a huge kick one day of naming me "El Count", boy you should have seen her laugh at that! There are plenty more hiker names.

Well, the sequence of all of this traveling gets mixed up and I can't remember when or where, there are so many knobs and hills and gaps, so many shelters and at Doc Knob shelter there was this bit of writing penned on a post: "The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious."  And I saw in Wuthering Heights, an etymology of knob, coming from knab, a sort of rolling hill, with a defined top, as in maybe a door KNOB, but we have come to see knobs as steep and more like what one would term a mountain. A knob means we are going to be going up a lot, steeply, not some little bump. The terminology bothers Kim as she feels a knob should be smallish and all the ones we have found are far from that. And you can't forget about krags and knolls either, even trolls on knolls or krags with hags.

Apple Pie Update: the apples that Kim and I picked at Simm's Meadow were brought down to Pearisburg and Kim made two pies. She didn't have time to make them the first night as we had to walk many miles in town just to do laundry and a few other errands but she got them peeled and made, ready to bake that night. And then, early, 5:AM, (as all the young hikers who called themselves Team Blueballs slept off the effects of their intoxicating indiscretion the night before, rolling hay bails down into the Wal-Mart parking lot from a field near the hostel), she turned the oven on and began to bake. The smell wifted and wafted up into the loft and woke our young friends and they came down bleary eyed, questioning. Who is making pie at this hour????? After which Kim gave them one of the pies. They loved that. She saved the other full pie for Bill Gautier, the man who came and got us on the outskirts of town, our ride, and who drove us to the trailhead later. He was very touched, even with almost a tear in his eye. A relative of his had just died and he saw my Dad's dog tag around my neck and asked about it. I told him Dad had died this summer, and with the pie and some tears and some human touch, we left him and walked back into the woods. And we don't walk like Bill Bryson and we don't want to read no Bill Bryson. We'll let him hike his own hike. The skinny on Bill from thru hikers is that his book is for people who are not actual hikers; it is the record of someone who never became a hiker, who never got into the movie. His take was an outsider's take.

The acorn falling is mostly done now but for a while there, they were coming down like crazy and what a noise they made. Plop, bing, bang, smash, pip, ping, whap, thomp, thwip, smack, down they came, for weeks and at first they were all with their little hats and bright and green they were and then the hats started to come off and the colors went to oranges and reds, and now they are all brown and ground in, covered with leaves. Their time has come and gone. For a while they were everywhere and now they are hidden underneath, stashed by squirrels, now sprouting, now moldering, now even the biggest oak has no advantage over the small, the forgotten one may become the mightiest, the tiniest the most grand. The future of the offspring we cannot know. We see many old field trees with low sprouted branches. They are now surrounded by young growth. You can tell they were field trees because of the low branches; forest trees grow straight up competing for light, with few low branches; a field tree has the luxury of being able to branch out. The old field trees have a mightiness to them, a sort of bulky branchiness, a mystique, a memory, that they saw days when all was different and the forest begins to close in and what was once open is now enveloped by green and quiet.

At the Pearisburg hostel there was a cemetery and I went over and read all the head stones. Many were overgrown and the stones so old that the inscriptions were indistinct and unreadable; the monuments against time had succumbed; the memory of whole lives was being swallowed by briars and grass. One stone said the guy's name followed by this quote: "gone but not forgotten". That struck me. What struck me most was that I was the one who was not forgetting. His memory, although unbeknownst to me, was resurrected and I went farther than that as I remembered the slaves in their burial ground with no stones at all. I had to think of my own Dad and how he used to ask me if I got my ashes hauled and then one day I found myself literally hauling his ashes to his final resting place there in Leidy's cemetery in Souderton, PA. Gone but not forgotten, yes, and even the memories will be gone one day; it's kind of sad, but that's the way it is, wind. The wind is what is left. The sun will one day go out and turn into a red giant and incinerate the earth and all of the life we have known and the life yet to come will be a memory, to whom? When we are gone, how will we not be forgotten?

We met a father and daughter out for a few days and we took a shining to them and slowed down to be with them at night. Kim gave Molly her sassafras walking stick and her Wal-Mart green hat and we all enjoyed staying in the grottos of an abandoned cherry orchard and whiling away the hours by Dismal Creek Falls. Life is good when you are not in a hurry and can stop and enjoy what may unfold. Gary gave me a leather bracelet and we all gave each other a sense of the basic goodness of humanity.

Later in Bland, VA, we came out and hitched in to pick up a food drop and I went over to a Civil War memorial, obviously not to any Yankees. It said: "Fate denied them victory but crowned them with glorious immortality. The gallant sons of Bland County who gave their lives in defense of their beloved southland." It strikes me that the Civil War is long from being forgotten and this whole red and blue state thing is nothing more than the Civil War all over again. You have the blue with all the power and means of production, Boston, NYC, Philadelphia, DC, Baltimore, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, LA, all blue, all the money, all the intelligentsia, just like the North of the Civil War, and the rest, the red, wanting to hearken back to a former time, just as the South clung to feudalism as the rest of the West went for the industrial revolution.

One day at Davis Farm camp, off a lovely little blue blaze (side trail) just above Burke's Garden, a sort of hidden valley of intimate agriculture and farms, sometimes known as God's Thumb Print, for the shape of the valley, one day we camped there looking down over this rural life and I went to get water. The source was a very small puddle, with of course, a salamander in it and in 1 and 1/2 hours of dipping my cup, I got 3 gallons of water. The water just did not recharge that fast after I dipped some out. I sat there watching all and dipping slowly, as to not disturb the bottom, as similarly one day, many years ago, John set us kids to getting water off a dripping mossy rock out in the VT woods. When I was down there getting water Kim got lots of wood, as she is like a major pyromaniac and she loves to crank the fire and we then later ate and watched the night lights grow over the valley. We watched the fog creep in and the stars come out and Kim delights in showing the constellations and we both have felt just nice to be outside in the night and early morning, to watch the sky through all it's subtle crepuscular permutations and to see the moon wax and wane and to sometimes even be amazed that we are actually on a planet, with a moon, around a sun, in a solar system and a universe and that all these bugs crawling around, all this wind and laughter and grass and fire, is all somehow out in space, an incredibly vast space that we then sit around the fire with Buddha and reflect upon our place, our meaning and then wake the next day, tell a few jokes, lighten up the hearts and then hike on. This AT life is really very nice. We like it a lot.

On our way out the next day there was a dead skunk in the middle of the trail, mouth open, frozen in its death throws. What could have happened to this skunk? Perhaps a young carnivore had yet to learn... Later we saw a black snake, frozen too, but not dead, just frozen to keep from being noticed as alive. Now with this cold the nightly serenade of frogs and bugs has stopped completely. The fall has gone on for a long, long time; it has been a special time to be outdoors in beautiful Virginia. The nightly chorus has been quite a performance and the ensuing quiet of cold is just as noticeable.

We have sort of a division of labor: Kim cooks dinner and I always do dishes. Even if I do cook dinner I still do dishes and for that Kim says I may be keeper enough. I hang the food line and put up the food. I set up the tent. Kim gets down the food line in the morning and makes coffee. I take down the tent. We both get water. Kim carries the heavy water bag to a dry camp and I get her 1/2 gallon to carry. Kim will create a dish for dinner that is always good and that I am always appreciative of. She has great food instincts and is very creative with limited resources. I think she is really good with food. She is an artist, creative, unafraid to experiment, maybe she's a true scientist, which might be what an artist is anyway? We have enjoyed our style of hiking, which is heavier than many, but OK with us. We do 10 or so miles a day. We don't need the hype. We enjoy what it is we do. The other day we knocked off 16 miles with no trouble by 2:30 PM. It all depends on the substrate. If things are rocky or wet, or muddy and slushy or icy, or whatever, that slows you down and time cannot be made. After a food drop the packs become very heavy. If there is water, then we carry full water plus the water bag and that is very heavy. Heavy but that's OK. We are in trail shape, lighter of weight ourselves. Now we are less concerned by peer pressure for ultra-light gear as we are hiking our own hike, inside the story, in our own movie and that is good enough for us. It is tempting to criticize the styles of other hikers, but the higher moral ground is in not tearing another down to build oneself up. This is not always easy as human thought seems to thrive on comparisons and measuring differences and to withhold judgment is difficult at best. 

Now, for an eye opener: Kim has carried as many as six books at a time, Cold Mountain, The Lord of the Rings #1, a math book, a Spanish dictionary, The Little Prince (in Spanish, El Principito), the current AT section guide book, 3 plastic maps, a plastic Spanish vocabulary list, as well as toenail clippers, scissors, special rocks, chestnuts, our wallets and papers, pills, first aid stuff, a Furbie, a glass coke bottle, hand cream, other cream etc. This girl is strong! I'd say Kim looks like an Olympic athlete now, trim, well defined, powerful, agile, graceful. Some people are natural athletes. They move with a natural grace. I think Kim is one.

So now, back to Partnership Shelter, we left after our zero day there and hiked at a good clip as it was quite cold. It was difficult to regulate body temperature; you get too hot, too cold, really cold, and you have to keep changing clothes, all the while the wind is whipping and you also need to stop and get groceries on board, and so the cold and wind puts on pressure to move, to stay warm, no more lazy lying around looking at views and bugs crawling from here to there. Now the last bugs hold on to bark with eyes open, sluggish, hoping to hang onto their measure of life as the temperatures drop and the life forces diminish. We hiked about 8 miles real quick and got to the Holston River where we were preparing to stop and fill up water to carry to a dry camp. Kim had said earlier that she felt there would be trail magic at the next shelter. We had determined to go out and take whatever weather we had coming. We had stayed long enough back at Partnership and now was time to buck up. We're here to do it! Three cars drove by, Kim waved, and the last one came back, backed up down the hill and this guy got out and asked if we needed a ride? I looked at Kim and said, "Do we need a ride?" , as we were not planning on going to town, and Kim said "....yes, we need a ride". It was really nasty out, windy, snow, freezing rain and this guy came back to help us out, to take us in out of the weather that was forecasted to be even worse. He was a homespun kind of guy, with flannel shirt, drooping car with broken springs in the back, and he shoehorned us in amidst his horse feed, barbed wire and much bric-a-brac and he drove us to Troutdale, to the Baptist church hostel. Kim was really taken by him. I named him the Horse Whisperer, as he had that sense about him, of being a master, of being completely in touch, in a natural, unforced way. He was truly a trail angel. He was a person with real wisdom and compassion even though on the face of it some might see him as unsophisticated. And so he shuts off his car and we got out and Kim gave him a buckeye nut and a big hug, and he knew the buckeye was for good luck and he put it in his pocket, and then his car wouldn't start. Now it was time for a little Kimmie magic. She immediately went into the store and got a woman to give her jumper cables and another guy to give a jump and in 5 minutes, the Horse Whisperer was gone. I could see that in an alternate reality Kim could have gone for being Missus Horse Whisperer.

I see that Kim has magic and that she has an effect on people, and sometimes I have said to her, "Just go in there and ask one of those old homeboys for a ride..." and she later told me that her gift is something that I can't manipulate; it has to grow out of her own spontaneity, and so she did ask for a ride and got one immediately. She's got it, yeah baby she's got it, good looking, intelligent, compassionate, present; a guy might not be able to help thinking and feeling that, hey, it would be very nice to be with her full time.

At the Baptist hostel there were separate sleeping quarters for men and women. We accepted that just fine. Later, Kim got to talking with the minister and asked him about a few things. As a result of asking, the preacher told her that we were sinners and would be going to Hell because we were unmarried but having marital relations. We were fornicators! We were probably more than that in his book. Buddha later improvised a hilarious song about this topic, as he is a singer and a karaoke kind of guy. I knew that this was believed to be so, about my potential fate as an unbeliever and yet I couldn't help but be put out: how is it that such charity can be coupled with such condemnation? With my Quaker Meeting in Tucson, when I helped Marbie do the homeless sleepovers during the winter, no one told those guys they were going to Hell because of sloth and laziness. We did straight on service and charity, a pure gift. Why bring in people to help them and then think to condemn them? That doesn't seem too love your neighbor as yourself to me. Why is my Quaker belief not good enough as Christian? How can one be MORE Christian than another?

I see a difference of focusing on the letter of the law, the book versus knowing the sense of the law. Literalists give trouble when they can't see outside the letters to what those letters really mean, what the intention is. Look, it is not about the book itself; it's about the contents and the contents are more than the sum of the words; the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We have met many great postmasters who have gone out of their way to help us, and others who have not helped us and said "no that is against the rules". The same with goes for cops. Good cops go outside the book and actually use their own judgment. It's more than a formula; it is a whole field of things to consider. If you have 20 years with no moving violations and then are 5 miles an hour over the limit, a warning is in order, not a ticket. Officer, can we talk purgatory here at least? And besides how can anyone as good as Kim be going to Hell? Kim has true compassion and charity. This kind of burns me up. My Dad was not a believing Christian. Is he in Hell? If my best people are going to Hell then I guess I want to go too. Harold Confer sent me this quote, Harold, in my opinion, a Quaker man of true service: "A man of sincerity is less interested in defending the truth than in stating it clearly for he thinks that if the truth be clearly seen it can very well take care of itself." Thomas Merton     I had to rant a bit on this, forgive me. In the end here, the Horse Whisperer showed himself to be the greatest; he the one who said nothing about Jesus.

For the William Blake aficionados, for those of us all who read the Bible day and night, while thou readest black while I readest white, from Matthew 7:13  "...for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction..." I guess we'll find out one day who had it right. We'll see who is in heaven and who is not. And here's another good one apropos of this discussion, from Scott's The Black Dwarf, the dwarf asks "and why should other worms complain to me when they are trodden on, since I am myself lying crushed and writhing under the chariot wheel?" What good does it do for pots to call kettles black? Where does one sinner get off calling another a sinner? I expect we'll just have to try and see that "all works together for the good" Romans 8:28, as the Reverend Ted Thompson used to be fond of saying in Wichita Falls, TX. This stuff is hard to open up among folks with many views and so I hope that my take can be seen as just part of my journey. M words are my truth, one take, a picture in time which is growing and evolving. I really can't say why or where in the biggest questions. These are just my opinions, which have grown out of my life and my personal history.  Fair enough, eh? 

And speaking of views, on Mt. Rogers, the highest peak in VA, which Kim climbed serendipitously with the same preacher that gave me a ride to Troutdale in his RV, and who was a real cool guy, there was a fantastic view! It was a towering, majestic view, equal to any out west, looking out over the mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina. Kim and I both agree that Virginia is one heck of a nice state for mountains and outdoor appreciation. At the shelter up there not far from the summit it was bitter cold, savage even, a winter wonderland of snow covered trees, wild ponies, high meadows and wind swept krummholz forests. Kim and I and Buddha slept up in the loft while some folks from the Philippines slept downstairs where Kim had swept out the snow earlier. It was really cold that night and I felt like Harry Houdini in my bag, with Velcro straps, strings, toggles, buttons, jackets, pants on like a straight jacket with brutal cold air seeping in, and no pillow either, downright savage conditions. Having no pillow is bad. Kim's boots were frozen solid the next morn and she was scared. She couldn't get full sox into them and luckily she made out OK. She's now over at the outfitter trying to warranty out the boots as they leak and have been trouble. I hope things go as she wants. We've done more than 500 miles in VA alone and soon we'll be in NC and TN. We are on the home stretch, now with hard weather gear shipped in. Down to the Smokies we'll go, to 6000' for long stretches, up higher just as it gets colder. The fun continues but the end of the line is in sight. We saw all the mountains to go from up on Mt. Rogers. Some things you don't want to end.

11/5/05  Erwin, TN

Well it has been a short one since my last time here on a computer but

the new stuff is fun and calling to be written. We yellow blazed up

about 70 miles from Damascus, VA to Carver's Gap on Roan Mountain, TN,

thereby bypassing the most potentially troublesome area on the trail.

Notes from Ash Gap on 11/2 "Thousands of feet below are vistas of forest still in full color, through bare, gray trees that rustle with the last leaves of ash. The horizon through the trees is hazy purple,

indistinct, fading straight downhill through endless tree shapes

silhouetted against pale, blue Fall sky. Coals from last night are

still in the fire pit and newly fallen leaves cover nice flat areas for our tent. We'll have good sleeping. We are in a saddle below Roan Mountain summit and the ground here just called us to stay. Why not stay where it is so nice that you just like it and don't want to go on? I just dipped 3 gallons of water from the spring below in around a half hour. The low sunlight makes long shadows and the quiet stillness of nature welcomes us back. This is so much nicer than town! Kim has gathered lots of wood and wants to start the fire from the coals later on. It is like we are in a fantastic painting or in a great story book, sunset, sunrise, cherry sky glowing, night enveloping the day, dawn coming, tree shapes changing, growing more distinct, gaining depth and now, a new day." 

The leaves really get me. The LEAVES! I love the leaves, rustling, the

smell of them bringing all sorts of Fall memories of being a kid and

jumping in huge piles of leaves. The leaves blanket all. They cover all as if they were some colory snow, untouched and pristine in a similar way to how snow envelopes and covers all. It is a blanketing effect. For me the leaves are just tremendous! We have watched the

leaves change for months now, from the beginnings to full fledged Fall

to Winter and frozen boots even. The rustling of leaves in the trees is

like waves on the ocean, swooooosh, swiiiiish, it comes, it subsides,

it is rhythmic, soporific and the wind itself, full of the spirits of

all creatures who have ever lived. It's Tyrannosaurus, Dire wolves, my

Dad, blowing through unseen, revolving around the earth, around this

mountain with hidden force, invisible yet present: spirits: inspire,

Respire, transpire and expire. The wind is the earth's breath. This constant living outside brings us inside of the seasons, inside nature; we see all of each day, from the first light on the horizon to the stars pulling their twinkling cloak over the day.

The substrate is constantly varying and it is tough on the old feet.

You need to develop an unconscious knowledge and ability to navigate

slippery roots, mossy rocks, wet logs and leaf covered rubble. I spend

a fair enough time looking down just trying not to fall. What we need

to do is walk like guys from the Sierra in Mexico, to develop that

graceful foot strike that these friends of mine use to walk on the

volcanic mesas of Sonora and Chihuahua. When I walk out into 'el campo'

with these guys, they don't look down at their feet; they go along just

fine, in home made shoes, while I must constantly look down to not

stumble, with my $150 boots. With the people from the Sierra, the

feet get picked up higher, it is a side to side kind of hopping,

rolling gate. Lucy can always tell someone from the Sierra when they

are in Hermosillo, just by how they walk.

Some foods are known among hikers as being the best for calories per

weight per price. Pop Tarts seem to be one of the best values. I have

imagined Pop Tart commandos after bin Laden, for 50 cents a pop,

amazing through-hikers get America's most wanted where the army could

not succeed! Sponsored by Pop Tarts! Other popular foods are the Lipton

dinners for a dollar, ramen, gorp and energy bars. Not many drink coffee

in the morning because of concerns about the weight of fuel and water

and the time needed to prepare it. We are coffee drinkers. We go heavy

and that is our hike.

The AT in many ways is an opportunity to build a sense of membership in a community. A real sense of belonging does emerge. This entering into the AT community is for the most part unscripted; you pick it up as you go, and doing the miles is the only way to join. You find your own way into the potential transformations offered; you hike your own hike and it comes to you.

Other outdoor opportunities like SCA or Farm and Wilderness have started as simple endeavors similar to just hiking the AT. It became apparent that there was some magic and potential for genuine growth in these simple outdoor experiences. As organizations that specialize in outdoor experience have grown there seems to have grown as well pressure to quantify the experience. What is essentially a very personal identification and transformation, coming out of direct, simple living now must be measured and outcomes attempted to be controlled. There comes an element of scripting which stands in direct contradiction to the former simple spontaneous learning and growth.

If you are trying to sell magic, I guess, you need a formula and it better work. And when this bottled magic experience is so bloody costly, parents, donors and agencies demand some accountability! Thus the need to quantify, script and be formulaic. I don't think this alchemy can be quantified and made to be formulaic. If there were a formula it would be this; the magic comes out of a very simple proposition: simple, direct living is sincere and empowering. This simple direct living brings a person to their core and to the heart of the things that really matter in life.

Once you try to steer serendipitous magic, it is no longer that which you are looking for. It gets turned into a commodity and not a personal process. For example, an AT hike might be written up in Backpacker Magazine, but it is not about the gear or the number of miles or even a particular place. There is an intangible aspect that cannot be planned for and created: it has to just emerge. Space has to be given for things to emerge, unstructured space. There has to be that freedom, to allow things to go how they will like Mike Gray does on his Mexico programs. (Ironically this freedom also implies a danger of people being out of control. Outcomes cannot be guaranteed if people are free to exercise their own free will. Things will be different every time. Fears start to step in and control is attempted to head off any excesses of personal freedom. Already on the AT there are tons of signs up telling people how to behave, how to shit, how to camp etc. People now fear that more controls will be put on AT hikers as the sheer numbers start to create unacceptable impacts.) But, back to talking about serendipity and magic, Fred's Rule: the more quantification, scripting and formula, the farther you are from it.

Now here is a tale: Kim found a little twig with lichen on it in the

shape of a cross and she put it in her hair. We then met the Singing

Sisters, one of whom saw it and went to take it out and Kim said "no,

it is a twig in the shape of a cross". Whoa Nelly, this got the

Sisters to start really paying attention; the buzzards started to circle and move in. Kim was very diplomatic with them, "it can't hurt to have someone pray for me.", she said. They prayed for her and Kim told them she "was

close" to understanding what Jesus was all about, meaning that she

understands the essential messages of Christianity but the sisters took

this to mean something else. As they were in a prayer circle, one of

them, who looked like the Church Lady from Saturday Night Live, said

"do you want to????" and Kim said "want  to what?" and then after a

moment, "oh, you mean accept Jesus Christ as my savior, no, not now,

when I'm ready, in my own time...". But the Sisters were pretty worked

up at the smell of a conversion; they even cried and got in some

hallelujahs and other stuff; they got really emotional and then we were

on our way. These evangelicals have a real in-your-face thing going, a

holier than thou, nearer my God to thee type of attitude. What could

the Fredster actually have to say? I said to the Sisters one thing: "if the Pope himself admits that he doesn't know God's plan for humanity, then how can anyone else know?" But you can't talk to them; it is their

way or nothing. My statement fell on deaf ears and I sat back and watched Kim handle them. Later Kim would say that this experience was one of the weirdest ever for her. "Do you want to?"

The people who keep their religion to themselves are much more persuasive, elegant and graceful. The Christian evangelists are like a broken record. What happened to the mind that God gave them? I am not knocking Christianity in general, just this limited expression of it. These towns we are going through are packed with churches and it seems from an outsider's perspective that one of the main options here in the South is to be totally Christian. I wonder how the locals relate to each other, when they are all from different denominations? Is there only one true way and the rest are sinners even among local Christian churches? It is troubling to me to be evangelized, as I see it as a cartoonish type of reality that is almost mindless. The experience irks me; it ruffles my feathers because it is such a one-sided, stilted interaction. I am not in some sort of cosmic war between good and evil, so please leave me out of it.

Now we have 350 miles left to go, and some long runs of 10 days or so

with no re-supplies and the packs will be heavy. The money budgeted is

growing short but we are generally on track. It seems that the

trip is costing about $1000 per month so far. Well, here at this hostel there is too much distraction and this is all I can do now.

11/14/05  Hot Springs, NC

We recently pulled our first 19-mile day coming out of a small cemetery where three people were buried. We passed another cemetery earlier that day where we each fixed up one of the two graves, cleaned them, spruced them up and left them gone, but not forgotten, way out in the woods. Kim felt the second cemetery was perhaps the place that inspired the book Cold Mountain, which she just recently read, so we decided to pull up there and camp, leaving our hiking buddies of a few days, Banshee Bill and That Guy to go on to the next shelter. We camped; got water out of a small spring a half-mile away, made dinner and enjoyed a very nice spot with big trees leafless shifting shapefully in the wind. The small gravesite had three markers, all from North Carolina soldiers who fought for the Union. Many southerners from the mountainous regions were Union sympathizers as they had no slaves and no compelling reason to want to fight for the Confederacy. These people were known as yeoman farmers, small independent farmers who valued their own liberty and did not need to be railroaded into a fight to preserve slavery or state's rights. Just leave them alone and let them be. So there they were, gone but not forgotten, Millard F. Haire, 1850 - 7/1/1863, and David Shelton CO.C  3 N.C. INF. and his young nephew William Shelton CO. E.  2 N.C. INF. They were ambushed by Confederate troops when they came to this remote location for a family reunion. The 13 year old was the lookout. In the peaceful breeze and moody weather of the afternoon, such conflict and loss of life seems so far away from what really counts in our lives. We reflected on the Civil War and war in general, and how innocent parties get swept away in hatreds that ultimately are trivial, that result from those in power's inability to talk, to compromise, and to be willing to back down to save lives. Why not just have let Bush and Saddam have duked it out in the ring and let the rest of us carry on? There is something very stilted when so many must suffer for the indiscretions of a few.  

That night we experienced a savage rainstorm. The wind came through like a freight train, like 25 jets at once, pelting rain ridden on huge gusty waves of wind, driven hard and our MSR Hubba Hubba did pretty good, just slight drip intrusions  and nothing big to get us wet. Kim actually snored through most of it, comforted by the sound of the rain, secure that snags and deadfall would not crush us, that lightning would not fry us, while I lay there amazed and awed by the storm. The wind would get up to such a fury of howling that I imagined an alien space ship had touched down out there and we were going to be abducted. How could she sleep through that? After it all blew by in a few hours, very cold temperatures followed. In the morning we picked up in the dark, early, anticipating our 19 miler, to catch the other guys at the next shelter. At 6:AM we were gone and walking fast to stay warm. The wind was still strong and frost covered the grass and ground. We went over spines of ridges with towering views of mountains in the distance, all of which we will walk through; we see mountains, mountains, mountains, valleys everywhere and we just go, up and down, up and down, without much thought now to height or difficulty. We are in great shape for this now and sunken deep into the process; the goal has become the journey. At 15 miles we had descended quite a bit and then had 4 miles basically straight up, a bad pull for the end of the day. I got two heel blisters and nearly ran out of gas at the end, needing to rest in the cold shade, in the wind, but Kim is a frickin' exercise freak and she was pushing for it and we made it rather early, by 3:30 or so. The there was the proverbial little teeny puddle to get water from, 20 minutes to recharge after dipping a quart. Kim calculated that on this day we went a total of 2,710' up, and 2,630' down, for 18.8 total miles. If we do something we feel is impressive for us, it makes it even more impressive to put the numbers to it! We did almost catch Banshee Bill and That Guy, but they were bailing out,  and we knew if we stopped and went over to talk that we'd never make it to the shelter in daylight; we had to choose one sort of serendipity for another.

Yesterday we slack-packed out of Hot Springs. The local outfitter drove us to the top of Max's Patch and dropped us off 22 miles from town, and Kim, myself and That Guy, a 60 year old Quebecer who we both like a lot and who has some great hard luck tales of ex-wives fleecing him for $500,000 etc., walked it back north at an average of 2 miles an hour, getting to town in the dark. The town glowed in the darkness, Kim said, like a Kinclade painting. It was neat to pull off a long slacker and That Guy bought pizza at the end! Some other new terms, in addition to slack-packing (a day hike on the trail, dropped off by someone, without the heavy gear): mountain money is toilet paper and Yogiing food is somehow getting strangers to give you food, perhaps without asking for it outright, as in Yogi the Bear. For example, "I Yogied an apple today". And then "blazing" becomes a suffix for any activity you might be doing, but you have to put a color to it...

Kim has gotten Montrail to send her a new pair of boots. The old ones will be sent back today. I hope she won't get blisters, but she does have better sox now, more strategy, Superfeet insoles and advice from various outfitters so I think it will go well. One major flaw to all footwear, especially hiking footwear is that all the shoes seem to come to a point in the middle. Show me somebody's toes that come to a point! Feet don't come to a point, yet all shoes are made that way. It is absurd, with the technology we have. I think outfitters should have custom boot shops, a custom machine to fit each foot, make the boots on the spot, get an inventor and a machinist and sell the boot machine. Lets' get Jeffersonian here! Mass production is not cutting the cake! A trend seems to be to have most if not all gear made in China or by other outsourced labor to save money on production costs. Name brand companies are bought and sold to the point where you can't trust that they are who they say they are. The over-all quality plummets while prices stay the same or even rise. Therefore the notion of quality gear may not even be attainable. The party for that may be over. Outdoor enthusiasts may have to accept that they must spend big bucks for gear which may buy status but which will have less material quality.

We stayed at a hostel back in Erwin, TN, and the proprietor, Miss Janet, has a tradition of serving a big biscuits and gravy breakfast and then posing a question for discussion around the table. Hers this time was "how will the proposed new movie by Robert Redford and Paul Newman, based on Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, how will that effect things on the AT?" It was an interesting discussion. Kim followed it the next day out on the trail by asking, "What should hikers give back to the trail?", "should people who are professional trail bums and adventurers give anything back to society?" "Do these people have any responsibility to society or do they just do what they want as individuals"? Maybe as Joseph Campbell said in Hero With a Thousand Faces , what the hero brings back from his or her journey is their boon, their insight, their special find that they got out there following their heart. And so I think trail bums do have something to offer. We are out here clearing out our minds and souls, maybe we are finding that the gifts are all within? I don't know. We can share the boon of what is a rare experience; we can be little John Muirs! We have "food for thought", as some guy kept saying to Kim. At the very least we are learning a high level of self-reliance and developing an ability to make things work; if we don't do it, no one else will. And shoot, I have collected water out of leaves sitting on the ground, teaspoon by teaspoon, you have to do what it takes to drink water in this world baby.

What Miss Janet's question ultimately posed to us was a discussion about the tragedy of the commons. If the trail represents an opportunity to exercise one's individual freedom yet this freedom somehow ends up detracting from other people's experience or even damaging the commons, then there is something wrong with this picture. If every dog must get theirs as quickly as possible because other dogs will just get it if they don't, then that is not freedom in any sense. That is survivalism. If we do owe nothing; if we bear no responsibility, then the ultimate fate of the trail will be a tragedy of the commons.

Books I have read so far: Siddartha and Steppenwolf, by Herman Hesse, The Maltese Falcon by Dashiel Hammet, Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte, Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset and one trashy Nazi spy novel by a popular author. Got to get back to business here, back to the hike, out of the library, hasta luego.

AT News #9 Great Smokey Mountain National Park

11/29/05 Fontana Dam, NC

The Smokies treated us to a spectacular private showing of nature, featuring power, grace, mystery, awe, magic and innumerable other faces, acts, garbs, personalities and costumes and the real fun of it was that we would never have been there at this time but for certain twists of fate (not twits of fate).

We had been noticing that by being open to serendipity our whole trip could be altered; you take this path or that and a future lies equally down each one, which to choose? What life would we have if we just went down that road right there? Kim said one day that the trick is to balance serendipity and planning; to an extent you have ideas and plans and on the other hand you allow the game to come to you. Our next level deeper into adventure started back in Hot Springs with a series of events beginning with waiting for Seth. Seth's visit was perfect, topped off with a Kim-made pesto dinner with pine nuts from New Mexico from Mike and Nora.

When it was time to leave Hot Springs, we decided we didn't have enough money to pay $40 for a ride back to Max's Patch and that we would just walk it again; so what if we had already paid $40 to slack-pack and it would take us three days to hike what we had done in one. We just did it without looking back. At some point in here fate became twisted I believe, for us to have the experience we did and also to cross paths with some very special people. You can always say that wherever you end up, that is destiny, as it is a destination, but fate may be another matter than mere destiny. I don't know; this is for our faith to decide why it ended up as it did.

On 11/16 or so, our first night out of Hot Springs back on the trail we had a shelter to ourselves with a nice big fire. All the wood was wet but I had a wax, lint and egg carton fire starter and the wind just whipped up those coals and I tossed on lots of big wood and soon enough flames were roaring and we were cozy and full of food. The rain and cold were beaten back with small comforts. It's dark more than 12 hours now and we have grown used to long nights. You'd think we could read for hours but two things prevent that: one, your hands get too cold to hold the book and two, the flashlight batteries can't take sustained cold without being used up too quickly. The batteries need to be saved for the whole section and so we turn in early. We must shepherd our food and resources to last for the whole section and then also have some in reserve for an emergency.

On 11/17 it turned cold with a 19 degree low in the morning. We coaxed a coal into a nice morning fire and then walked 12 miles over the long, big pull of Bluff Mountain. The top was covered with frost, into a kind of elven wonderland of white frosted trees and wind. We passed through thickets where before I had battled bushes with my Samurai stick, where we had slacked 22 or 23 miles with That Guy. The second time was easier as we knew the lay of the land. Familiarity makes a path shorter and shorter.

OK, on 11/18 we came out over the bald top of Max's Patch for the second time at maybe 11:AM and looked far and wide over a 360-degree vista. It is a very nice view from up there with a sea of mountains extending in all directions. It was like looking out over the roiling ocean and knowing we must go in there and then even past there. We knew that if no one had a cell phone at the trailhead that we couldn't go to the SOBO HOBO hiker feed in Sylva, NC. (SOBO is short for south bound hiker.) There was one chance for us to make a call to arrange a pick-up. Some very generous folks had arranged this big feed and party for the SOBOs and on their website was a general itinerary for pick up points on 11/19. If you could tell them, they would have someone pick you up at a gap or road crossing. So, we are still a pretty fair distance up the hill and see no one at the trail head, no chance for a phone and just then a big nasty truck comes up the hill in a cloud of dust and pulls into the parking area and two guys get out. Homeboys to the rescue!

Kim hurries up to get there and yells, "do you guys have a cell phone?", "Yes Mam" one guy answers, as southern speech tends to be peppered with many Mams and Sirs. I then dialed us in. Alright, we're in!; it's the Matrix; fate, destiny, the call is in. Someone will be coming. To the feed we were going and then the only thing was we had to cover a little better than 20 miles before 10:AM the next day. We stepped on it and probably walked 18 or 19 until it began to get dark. We pulled up in a saddle off the trail and had a cold dinner, our first cold and only cold dinner of the trip, with just barely enough light to set up the tent and hang the food and crawl into our nest of a tent.

It had been cold and the morning of 11/19 was no exception, but we were going to the party and a buzz of anticipation and excitement filled us with energy and good humor. It was a big thing for us, to go to this gathering and we were like kids on XMAS morning. And what a feed it was! The food was plentiful, tasty and tremendous, from the hoursdouerves of fresh salsa and corn, bean dips to a huge smoker grill filled with burgers, dogs and sausages. And then there came the turkey and jalapeno cornbread muffins, the salad and everything else topped off by 6 or 7 different desserts. All in all it was quite a spread, put on by Sidetrack and Strider, the SOBO HOBOS from Sylva.

The scene itself was pure Americana, straight from Woody Guthrie, from Jack Kerouc, Ken Kesey, Neal Cassidy, John Steinbeck and Studs Terkel. Tales of America as wild adventure. Somehow we landed in the middle of the real thing; railroad tracks were just out back with slow trains passing; a large hardwood logging operation was on 2 sides with big stacks of logs and stickered wood punctuating the views up towards the boundary of the Smokies. We were ensconced in the heart of real America, an older America that was small town intimate, friendly, open and yet containing the possibilities of the drive out west and newer ventures to the cities. It seems we were inside a moment in history and actually living it at the same time. Our adventure was one with all the great adventures; we were the Canterbury Tales. We were Cassidy, Kesey and Guthrie. (We later could see Sylva from Clingman's Dome at the top of the Smokies.) There were fires made and the current tribe was gathered to sit by the tracks on stumps and logs where we traded tales of adventure and woe, of the what was past and what was to come, of what was ineffably NOW.

AT hikers are the crème de la dirty and that is one calling card that gives membership in the hiker club. You just get really dirty and smelly and unkempt and so imagine 50 of us stuffing our faces and laughing and enjoying the pleasures of a safe haven. It was circus-like in a way and we were the main attraction. It all started to wind down around dark and Kim and I got ready to leave as we had intended to be driven right back to the entrance of the Park, to set up in the dark and start the back hiking the next morning.

However the fellow who came to give us a ride to the feed turned out to be more than just a driver. His name was Nean (Let It Be) ands his was the place where Banshee Bill and That Guy bailed out around 15 miles shy north of Hot Springs, 4 miles shy of the next shelter. Kim and I had walked by that day because we knew that if we stopped in, we'd never make it to the shelter by dark and so we had to consciously go on, to avoid serendipity that time in favor of the plan. It seemed now that we had a date with serendipity and Nean that we had missed and the Playwright, the Artist, the Unseen Hand, was going to make it happen. So we left the SOBO HOBOs with Nean at dark and headed back to the AT but somehow we got turned around and ended up in Asheville, in the wrong direction, at which time we regrouped and Nean invited us to stay at his house and we accepted his invitation. It was becoming apparent that Nean was a hikers hiker and a substantial guy. He has hiked the Triple Crown three times! Kim told him that the land had seeped into his soul and into his demeanor; he reflected the tranquil places a person can find for years on end out in nature. As Kim said, he had become the land; he had become it and his eyes showed it; Nature. He was a walking refuge in whose eyes the peace of nature showed. We liked Nean. I like the way Kim lets it rip and tells it like it is. She cuts to the quick. She sees from and into the heart.

It was late but Nean put on Bagger Vance and we had coffee and Kim tasted some peach and grape moonshine. (1) We slept on a real bed in a nice cabin just off the AT. We had great conversation about our journeys and traded gifts; I shared things from Seth and Mike and Nora. And there we were 15 miles NORTH of Hot Springs, in a special space Nean had created while on a new sojourn into girlfriend-ville. And then after a wonderful, tasty, hearty and well-prepared breakfast, he drove us back and we walked into the Smokies. The stage was set; the curtains were down in gray and rain. We were let behind these curtains into a privileged backstage place, given special access by a fairy prince of hiking; here you two hikers, here is your special Smokies experience, touched by magic, allowed in for a one-time only show.

As we entered in, at lower elevations, there were bugs, spiders and snails and toads camouflaged the color of fallen leaves. Life was still out and crawling around. The rain began to come down. It was a quiet, rich, post-Fall carpet of oaky, broad leaves of all colors and it was cold and still; the miles rolled on and somewhere in there we made an 8,500' total elevation gain in 5 miles and then we arrived, set up and the rain turned to snow.

On 11/22 we awoke to 5" of snow, 1/2" of crust, drifts of 1' to 2', 50 mph winds and around 20 degree temperatures. Wow! Norman was with us that night and he was going out of the Park and us in. He gave us bags of gorp (good old raisins and peanuts), coffee, chicken soups, hot cider mix and told us we'd be OK, which emboldened us to take on a powerful 8 miles through some of the most savage and wild spectacles of nature you can imagine.

We decided to go for it and the gauntlet was laid out; this was our crucible; we went; we did not turn back; we deiced to go through it; perhaps it was a test, whatever it was we sucked in breaths of adrenaline and went. We kept gaining elevation, with 3 to 5" of new snow predicted, from Norman's weather radio, and the snow, wind and trees all worked in concert to create a mystical path of winter wonderland. The trail periodically traversed ridges and exposed areas where we could actually stand on the abyss of wild, uncontrolled nature. This abyss was the line between life and death. The wind roared up the mountainsides and all we could see was white and a few close apparitions of trees standing ghostly in the fury of wind whipped snow. That snow whipped by in particles as if blasted from atomic space, wow, we stood in awe of the abyss; the place where life itself stood in front of giant motions of forces generated by the sun, yet it was bitter cold, where inorganic forces reigned supreme and all of us little bits of life held on to what we got.

It was a nature glimpsed rarely, at so powerful an expression. I've only felt like that twice before in all my adventures, once on some coastal rocks seeing furious ocean waves whip in an Olympic coast storm and the other in the 1983 flood of the Gila River up with the Rainbow People in Clifton, AZ.

The Smokey dates blur together now that we are out, in the Fontana Village Resort. There is no one here but us. It is exactly like The Shining, long halls of doors and the hum of the boiler, the empty bar and restaurant, locked doors, all quite spooky, with thunder and lightning and slashing rain outside.

In recounting this Smokies tale the dates blur; the memories blur: the boots sat frozen in the morning in the corner of a shelter. The boots sat as if meditating on the 1000s of hikers who had passed this way before. The boots sat above old candle wax, among mouse droppings, among old spider webs. The boots sat alone in the morning, in the thick air of our hike. That was enough of that. We started to bag the boots up at night in plastic and then use them for sub-pillows, which worked to keep them supple.

We figured we walked around 50 miles through snow-encrusted trees bent over the trail. We had to fight our way through these snow-laden branches and 2' drifts, fight for every step, making around 8 miles a day. It was tremendously hard and very tiring. I had to constantly protect my neck from falling snow and ice being dumped in from above, but it was sublime at the same time and tremendously moody with sometimes long views of the snowy Smokies 5000' down to the valleys below.

The moods and aspects made constant drama of skies and clouds and up close were small spaces under rocks and logs where we saw tracks of mice, chipmunks, chickadees, all finding shelter in mini-caves, eating their stashed nuts and pine cones. Downed clumps of tree roots provided windbreaks and temporary shelter, just as John said they would when I was 13. And when we found our own shelter for the night, it was exposed to the wind and very cold; the animals knew how to handle this better than us. We put the tent up in front of our bunks to block wind and we hunkered in, sleeping bags zipped together and snuggled up for warmth.

Kim has become very good at building a fire. First she scavenges all available candle wax and collects old coals and burnt wood; then she breaks out her tinder, saved to be bone dry and with perhaps the help of a piece of FCA fire starter, oila, we are cooking. Only trouble is sometimes it's so windy that breathing the constant swirling smoke is just not worth it. You want to be warm yes, but the smoke is sometime a deterrent, especially if it will be wafting into the shelter all night long. Kim has also developed a high elevation, cold temperature strategy for keeping us well hydrated. The really cold water is almost too difficult to drink; it's too cold and so Kim takes a 20 oz. bottle and puts it inside her sports bra to be warmed between her breasts. Sometimes a mother just knows how to take care of you! And thus every few hours we each got a good gulp of drinkable water, maybe even with Tang!

For Thanksgiving dinner we had cous cous mixed with chicken soup and cut up pieces of cold cut ham, with Parmesan cheese and crackers crumbled in and then hot apple cider for dessert. Thank you Norman for giving us this food! You hardly know what day it is let alone holidays and the specialness of a day is marked by other things, like the quality of the people we met or by special views, goals or experiences. The holiday cycle was out of our radar as we were no longer in the world of societal and cultural inertia; we were in a world made one moment, one acorn, one leaf and one person at a time.

The Smokies did seem like a test, a gauntlet and we stepped up to it; we went deeper into this movie of hiking and living outside. We showed ourselves we could take some really tough stuff. We held up. We are peeling back the onion, layer by layer and there keeps being more to find both inside and outside of ourselves. With the heavy cold and wind all food rules were suspended; we put food in our pockets for easy access snacking and began to cook deeper inside the shelters. You just can't cook outside in that cold wind and snow; you must hunker down and be ready to fight cave bears for your precious food. You have to be ready to spear cave lions and protect your hard won turf. Body temperature must be protected at all costs and dryness maintained, food must be eaten in copious quantities; give us a few skins and spears and we might even fit in back in the Ice Age. I love the Pleistocene ice age; it's my favorite era, stimulating my pure imagination and these were real, incredible creatures! I mean there were giant short-faced bears, American lions, Dire wolves, wooly mammoths and giant sloths! How can they be extinct? Anyhow, we took the cold and made it our own; we endured it and kept ourselves alive and even content.

The shelters are a whole scene in and of themselves. The shelters end being a messy hodge-podge of humanity, of snoring, of crinkling bags, of late arrivals, early-risers, of spilled dinners, mice running and rain blowing in. We joked that saber-tooth tigers would come in and drag off the heavy snorers, while the light sleepers would awaken and be able to defend themselves.  

At the one place where the road crosses the trail in the Park we came down following the tracks of fox or coyote, following the wild spirit of nature on fresh clean snow, only to be unceremoniously dumped into a world crawling with clean tourists and bozos out to take small tastes of what we had been gulping down by the barrel load. I found myself resenting these new bozo tracks in the fresh snow, our snow, the snow we earned by facing the abyss, the snow that they gained access to artificially and now my pure fox track spirit was crushed by day hikers. I could not fault them for wanting a taste. I suppose in many important ways you just cannot hike your hike without stepping on someone else's. I want all pure nature with just Kim and I there, like Ayla and Jondular from The Mammoth Hunters, maybe even just like John Muir or Aldo Leopold, but modern America is a far cry from that. It's just a fantasy desire, that's all, that there could be nature without a constant attack of bozos. As modern life becomes more artificial and people become more separated from nature, nature stands more as a beacon of what is true, real and pure and people want even a small taste of it. The irony is that when all the people converge to get their taste, then all they see is all the other people, the cars, the trash, the torn up trees. Sure, I am somebody else's bozo as well and we all witness the tragedy of the commons.

Curiously even during such hard, tough weather, many folks come out to experience just that; they want to see nature put on a show. Nice sunny days are a dime a dozen; that is the usual; people want a taste of the unusual, perhaps especially in the South, where snow IS more unusual. So out in this crazy cold we encountered 2 of the 3 most crowded shelters of the last 3-1/2 months. One night there was a classic Jack London type situation. These guys worked hard to get frozen, wet, snowy wood burning and then, after hours at it, just as they had some good coals going, a big piece of snow fell on the fire and put it out cold, see Jack London, To Build a Fire. At this shelter we met the Wise Window Washer and his father-in-law and I am continuing to be struck by how many nice people we have met; it's like one after the other, face by face, life by life. There is so much human quality out here that being a trail bum is really tantalizing as a life style. Here is where humanity can really shine; the differences that come up aren't severe; we can work them out, the bright side can show and all the cynicism and sarcasm and bitterness can fade away. It's like wow; this is what it feels like to really let a seed grow in clear soil in sunny weather. The trail can be a lifestyle choice where you can recognize someone who merely has a different take, a different twist on the same journey. They are you; you are they. The inner fabric becomes known; you see it. This is decidedly different than the rancor evidenced in the news and in popular culture and in politics or even academics for that matter, where you might be led to believe that whole classes of people actually lack humanity or are hopelessly ignorant with no clue or hope. The trail gives a breath of fresh air from this latter human tendency towards negative judgment. As Mechanical Man said, the trial equalizes all; we are all in the same boat. On the trail, we're all bozos on this bus.

Clingman's Dome, around 40' less than the highest mountain in the entire East, was a long pull for me. Kim went up as usual, the Kiminator, steady, always gaining on you, on cruise control, with the tortoise strategy uphill, and she's doing it in pain, bad foot, stress fracture, blisters, bad boots (Montrails suck; they don't stand behind their warranty.), super heavy pack and the upside to her, as an AT hiker just outweighs all of that. Still, even Kim said that Clingman's Dome was "like climbing Everest", steep, snowy, ever up, up, up, higher, colder, windier, the footing sketchier and sketchier with ice, snow drifts, slipping and sliding, branches down, having to fight through for each step. We made maybe one mile for each two of effort for at least 50 miles in the Smokies.

We kept on and got to Siler's Bald, which was very nice. For one we had gone just past the southern limit of spruce/ fir forests, that was it, the limit of southern boreal forest, period; then it was all beech and oak, through which the sun cast long shadows of silhouetted, infinitely ramifying tree shapes behind which stood mountain vistas through the leafless openness. The wind trickled through the still-on beech leaves with a kind of delicate tinkling to provide sound for the view. Shoooooohhhhhhh.........whooooohhhh.

Over all we were alone three nights in the Smokies, quite rare in the most visited Park in the USA.

I'm gaining a new level of walking ability where I seem to sometimes glide over the ground. It is analogous to Dr. J, poetry in motion, ("house call!!!"), walking totally in the groove. You see outside the trail; you can see the whole field. Your head is up and you still see all the roots and rocks and potential slips. You find your authentic stride and then even your heel strike is light and supple; you move unconsciously. Perhaps the wind then fills you with vigor, perhaps it fills you with reflection, maybe the fog turns you deep inside yet you still glide along. This is like letting the game come to you. You don't try too hard and by giving up to, by surrendering to your hike and to hiking, to your work, you thereby start to flow in it with no more friction. Too much focus and you lose it, only by this giving up to, does the whole field emerge. This is a continuous strand with how the whole day goes; we less and less decide all plans and then carry them out, rather we are more and more open to regroup and be open to what the journey offers at 3:PM. "We'll decide that at the next shelter." The goal starts to take a back seat to the moment. Trying too hard to walk and looking at all roots and rocks starts to blend into a zone of unconscious striding; it's the same process.

What might be the upshot of all of that? Again, when you are a hammer the whole world looks like nails. Trying to get to a goal with single-mindedness does not allow you to be open to finding anything else. Our journey now stands like a wide gate, like sometimes basketball players say, that making a basket is like throwing it in the ocean; you can't miss. We've seen you can choose the roads less traveled, even choose roads you don't even know about; they all lead you to what you want and desire, the new, the novel, something to tickle the neurons in a new way; this is what blue blazers and yellow blazers find. The journey is the goal. This reminds me of a comment Chris made long ago in NYC, with the bison horns on at Russ' apartment, he said, "Waves of what's happening, breaking on the shores of the moment."

At Spence's Shelter there were the most folks ever. What a scene! We met all these men with their gear and food and costumes and stories and trail names, with a big fire going inside and strong winds gusting without. The wind cranked it up big time; all night and then the next day dense fog over the snow came, with denuded trees disappearing into endless misty vanishing points. This was absolutely mystical (mistical?) and splendid! How much of this mystical magic can I take? I'll take an all you can eat buffet please. The fog always brings me to a sense of a veil between the known and the unknown. The fog seems to come and transport me to another, deeper place, into depths inside that are beyond anything normal. Fog is extra deep. The windy fog piques my imagination with its pale contrasts of shapes shimmering and blending into nowhere. Fog: I am then somebody on the verge of nowhere; the universe all of a sudden is new and undiscovered; I am a blank slate, anything could come. I love fog.

One day the wind took me down a wormhole; I felt another epiphany of being on the continuum of all of life, forever. And then we meet characters in shelters that are generous, kind, clear-sighted, wise, knowledgeable and glad to share it all. Steve even fried actual steak, gave us Gouda cheese, smoked almonds, bars, coffee, cocoa; Don gave us gorp and home made beef jerky. While we are not the actual, real McCoy, thru hikers, we have been out as long as thru-hikers anyhow, and 1000 miles is not chopped liver; and we've seen harder weather than many SOBOs, and many folks do a weekender in the hopes of meeting people like us, to rub elbows with modern vagabonds, to perhaps glean off of us a sense of the freedom we are finding, a sense of whatever it is that calls people to the AT. We are trail heretics, not purists, yet we have still found something folks find interesting to know. We are reluctant stars; could it be that we are special now, regular old us? The folks bring lots of food out, more than they need and the game comes to us in Yogi-ville. Everything seems to work out, you get a ride, you get food, you give food, you give fuel and you are in this web where it all just works out right. It only seems to work out right though, when you know how to play your hand, when you see the field. Having the sense of everything working out is matter of surrender and not control.

So far we have been traveling along the main backbone of the Appalachian chain, down the highest spine. Now coming out of the Smokies we begin to cut across the grain of the mountains. There are lots more ups and downs through the Nantahala mountains and then we'll turn south again on the Blue Ridge chain. Yesterday we made the big descent out of the Smokies to the Little Tennessee River and Fontana Dam. We started in fog, wind and slashing rain and then down to below the cloud ceiling and into more of the biologic where toads once again hopped. The curtain started to pick up and our special back stage experience began to draw to an end. Curtains up on our own private illusion! Curtains up for what could only be our destiny! Curtains up on an illusion in which we gratefully colluded!

At Fontana Dam we got a ride to the village from some nice folks we met and we settled into a deserted resort. We are the only people! There are 2 XMAS trees and a big fireplace and a couch, a chandelier, a sauna, all the stuff and we are inside The Shining too. We worked out our immediate future plans and all seems to be falling into place quite nicely, better than I could imagine. This trip is opening into other trips and the adventure is not ending, just continuing in other forms. Our stuff is strewn all over a room drying from the rain and ready to be repacked tomorrow and we are off again for our grand finale, the last 150 miles or so. It is sad in a way, as these moments have been special; their newness will never again be felt like this. On this trip we broke some things open.

Here is a PS, an imaginary sharing at Quaker Meeting from yours truly, this is thick stuff, hard to say clearly:

Each person contains all capacities and generates all possibilities. Being a part of the greater ALL imparts the inherent qualities of this ALL down to each personal level. Each contains their own smaller measure of ALL. This is like saying that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. We, as star-stuff, as God-stuff, are made of that same fabric as the cosmos, the same fabric as God. Everything is immanent within ALL, at all levels. All experience then, is isomorphic. This is fractals, God as a number, any piece can ramify to the whole; the whole ramifies to any piece.

If the self, as a representation of a smaller measure of ALL, is analogous to a shepherd with a flock of sheep, each aspect of the self, each sheep in the flock then, is an inherent and valuable member. This flock, this set of inherent capacities, is the self's/ shepherd's ALL. A good shepherd then cannot toss off one troublesome sheep here and there for conveniences' sake. And thus the ego, the intellect, the popular boogie men of spiritual hubris, need themselves to be shepherded wisely and not allowed to fall to the wolves, not allowed to be excised from the self or the whole of the flock. The shepherd has not done his work well if all the sheep are not brought home. We came with this inheritance of capacities, as part of our inheritance of ALL and it will only be by going through the whole flock, the whole set, and bringing them all in, that we will arrive at a true understanding of who we are.

And now to go beyond the sheep metaphor; we exist as whole sets of capacities and possibilities; we project our inner sets of relations and components onto the gods and onto the cosmos. The gods may actually be just us, all religions stemming from us, inherent within us, as we make them out of these forces and substances that are at once within us and of the very nature of the universe itself. Good and bad are perhaps not "out there" as if properties of some sort of exterior cosmic war but actually they are forces within humanity and within ourselves first. What I am saying is that it all starts within. This is the only place we can know anyway, and so it is a good starting point to work from.

"The kingdom of the Father is spread on the earth and men do not see it.": a quote from the Gnostic Gospels. This kingdom of potential understanding and enlightenment is latent with us. It is inside already. It can't be found outside. To find it you've got to allow your authentic stride to begin to allow the game to come to you. Too much control and "men do not see it".

Why are things this way? It doesn't really matter if we know why or not. It doesn't matter if we say Jesus, Buddha, Allah or evolution. We can't know ultimate causes; we can't know why. And whether we know why or not we still have to deal in this currency of our humanity; that's where we start, within.

So if all of magic resides within already, if it is real or illusion, we still have to work with it. It doesn't matter that it can't be proven, if it is faith, if it is illusion, if it is fact. It is here. Our common humanity IS the inner light within us all; it is also the inner darkness. What matters is to bring home all your sheep and find your authentic stroke, find your heart in it and to honor other's paths as they work in the same field as you.

(1) We found out from Larry, a trail friend, that moonshine has a peculiar southern history. Southern Baptists don't take much to drinking and smoking and so therefore there are many dry counties in the South and it was/ is hard to get liquor. Moonshine got made up in the hills, where it could be hidden and guys suped up cars, to be able to out run the police, to bring it to Atlanta. The only reason moonshine can be illegal is when you sell it and pay no tax; otherwise it is perfectly legal to make your own booze. The government is just hungry for the taxes on booze is all; that's the only reason that moonshine has this mystique, illegal sale and non-payment of taxes. This was the beginning of NASCAR racing, with homeboys racing cops to bring moonshine to town to sell. It is the Dukes of Hazard; it's Michael Hazard bringing cases of Qs to the reservation. Moonshine does not have so much of a history where there are not so many blue laws, as in the South. In the North where you can get gallons of cheap rock gut whiskey, there is no need for people to make moonshine.

12/12/05  AT News # 10, Blairsville, GA

Well, after what seems like a long hiatus from computer-land, I'm back, sequestered in a back room of a library on a non-internet computer which I can use to my heart's content, at least for another 6 hours or so that it will probably take me to type all my stuff up. This leg of the journey will describe from the Smokies/ Fontana Dam to Neel's Gap.

So, here we are, many miles down the road and the trip is almost over, only 50 or so miles left to go! I am in town here and Kim is back at the Walasi-Yi hostel cooling her heels. I hitched in to Blairsville this morning and with 3 hours of walking around town have completed our PO business, food shopping and now am ready to tell it like it is. As the seasons have changed it has become apparent that it is much like the tide going in and out. The detritus of summer and fall is now left bare, as if so much sea weed left behind by the receding waters and we see inside, into what formerly was obscured and are privileged to observe that which is usually hidden by green and by the bushiness of life. The life has gone away, nary a bird to chirp; the crickets are silent and we are left with wind, the infernal wind and all is barren on the forest floor before us. The tide has gone out; it is a larger rhythm than the actual tide but part of nature's rhythm just as sure. Now what once swam in the verdant forces of life has died or gone away and we see the shells, the husks, the dead bodies of what has been left by the receding of the seasonal tide; even the brilliant leaves have been mashed to dust by endless boot tracks; the once plopping acorns are now being dug up by feral hogs, bear and the rightful owners, the squirrels. With the tide out we are left among the rocks and ruins of what once teemed with life and is now but a shell, a ghost, a memory of its former self yet the tide must go out, there can be no life without death.

With the leaves all down vistas have opened up and the lay of the land is revealed; the contours of the face of the land are now are shown and known. The mystery of an enclosed forest now opens up into vast views of subtle topography, with skeletal trees showing as if so many whiskers on chins of earth and mountain. The hidden is now revealed and we look into long rolling draws and hollows; we see what lay obscured by endless leaves now brown as a carpet under grey silhouettes of endless trees. The forest has changed from a more mid-latitude composition to a southerly mix. It is not as if we cross a line and all of a sudden it is different; the plant communities' finger together, some are left at their southerly boundaries and more southerly species become more present, such as the magnolias.

The cold has been ever-present and hard: 5000', 18 degrees before wind chill and we crossed the main Appalachian chain through the Nantahala range and turned south again onto the spine of the Blue Ridge. The cold has put wrinkles on our faces and hardened us off; it is a whole new thing to be living outside under such extreme weather. You really learn how to work your gear with such hard weather. All those toggles, cords and pieces of Velcro do have some actual purpose other than to frustrate me as I wonder why a jacket needs all this stuff. Now I know. I pull on those cords and pull them tight and the wind is kept out. The snow is kept from falling down my neck. I can see side-ways with the pull of another cord; the hood does not obscure my vision. The Velcro keeps the zippers closed over so the wind does not penetrate to the core and other drawstrings close off the bottom to keep core heat loss to a minimum. I would say you really need a good winter, hard weather parka for this sort of trip and not a flimsy summer job, which has no features other than being insubstantial and light. You need a good solid jacket to go through months of hard weather. We have seen the lightweight crowd come through the hard weather and they do not look happy. Gone are the comments about how heavy our packs look as now we are prepared and it is obvious some are not.

Some gear does not hold up at all to a week of rain, snow, slush and mud. In those conditions you are just going to get wet, period. Gortex will not help you; it won't do it; nothing will wick anything; you stink in your low-odor shirt and it all weighs a ton. All the hype given in the store seems totally wrong and only designed to be said within certain narrow parameters, which the salespeople conveniently do not tell you about. For example, your 15 degree bag will only be 15 degrees warm on the first day of it's existence and only then inside of a 4 season tent and not out in actual wind, in actual reality. The hype is said large, in large swatches of bull crap but the reality is that under hard weather, the stuff does not perform as advertised; meanwhile Gore buys himself another yacht with one of the greatest pieces of hype of all time, that you can stay dry in the rain.

We made the short 2 or 3 day pull over from Fontana Dam to the Nantahala River and got a resupply and what turned out to be a much needed and much appreciated gift box from Rosie which had perfect, great food and got us through a pinch of not enough grub. Thank you Rosie! We did a strike force hit at the NOC, Nantahala Outdoor Center, and waterproofed our boots, did laundry; I got Kim a birthday present or two and whatnot. I met a man who let me listen to his weather radio for a 6 day forecast: rain, freezing rain, sleet, 35 mph winds, 70% chance of precipitation, snow and then turning very cold with highs in the 30s, lows in the teens and twenties, and the guy said "how do you like that?" and I said "pretty grim". And now all that weather has unfolded, come and gone and it has seasoned us; we hiked all day in the rain, another day in the rain, then freezing rain, thunder, lightning, massive wind just sucking the heat right off us and we had to persevere and cook, eat, have some birthday festivity and song, settle in; we had to laugh a number of times: "what the heck are we doing out here???? This is crazy, listen to that wind, listen to the rain whip the tin roof of the shelter", and here we are in our bags just reading our books as if all was normal, what the heck are we doing???? Have we grown so calloused and hardened that we can just read in this storm as if nothing was going on? That was a good laugh. We are doing the AT and we are going to get our 1000 miles and do it in our style. What you may ask is our style? Well we stop and camp if a place strikes our fancy; we stop to talk with anyone who is interested to chat; we take blue blaze side trails to vistas and points of interest and we don't usually go more than 15 miles a day. We are slow pokes who want to soak the experience in; we see what the tide has left, notice the currents and waves; we meander through our minds and through the woods, that's sort of our style. We're meanderers and we try to play our cards just right, not in any hurry, not too anxious to play our hand. We're purposeful yet open to what may come by.

As the hike draws to a close, there is less time left on the trail and it goes faster, just like the years roll by more quickly when you are older and life seems to be endless when in our youth. At the beginning of our hike the journey seemed massive and long, monolithic, deep, filled with mystery and unknowns and now that we have walked 950 miles, what was once huge is now known and done; it is smaller and the trip wanes as we arrive at the old age of our first big hike.

One day Kim came up with a few mathematical formulae for the time it takes me to catch her after I stop for a break and also for the effects of gravity on us going up or down hill. I asked her to write these up, as she loves to delve into math and allow that sort of creative energy to fill her up. I don't now have those formulae as she didn't do them, but if you ask her later, I'll bet she'll dive right into it; it was all about velocity and time I guess, spiced with the effects of gravity and weight, rate etc. We chattered for hours about this and then quiet crept in, only the sounds of our footsteps to punctuate what might become the next topic of consideration, where the muse might lead next, in this vast forest of a museum.

We met a young man named High Mountain who we liked very much and he left this poem in a journal at one of the shelters:

It's late autumn, heaven's compassion- deep

skies bottomless above a world gone frail.

Leaves tumble through wind blown forests.

The moon's radiance filling mirrored waters,

The way is treacherous, full of strange forms

Mountains on every side all transformation.

In the transformation of dusk and dawn, skies

fill rivers and mountains with crystalline light,

Crystalline light bringing such effortless joy

a wanderer rests content, all return forgotten.

Hsieh Ling-yun (385 - 433) CE

That's a good one High Mountain. I enjoy those who delve into their own personal transformations; I like that depth. One day, with the wind howling over my hooded parka I had the sense of hearing the ocean from the inside of a conch shell. I tumbled with the waves, rolling, transported, down a wormhole, through the swirling sand to a place where I knew I was on the continuum with all of life. Swooooosh, swiiiiish, wooooooosh, oh man did I roll, all with the swaying grey trees dancing on the ridge, rolled in tumbling gyres of imagination I swept along into some epiphany of the nature of reality itself. At least I can say that I feel a kinship with all of life and that in truth I am on the same continuum; I am made of the same stardust and through my eyes, one day on the AT, that continuum took me back to my childhood, into the very core reaches of imagination, the world inside a conch. Can you hear it?

One day after slogging through the rain we arrived at a shelter and we were the only ones. About a half hour later, 2 more guys came and then soon after, 2 more guys and a dog, a wet dog. What ensued was a Mad Max, Road Warrior type of scene: outside the rain pounded a gray, dismal wet forest and inside, hunkered down in the dark, eating over dirty pots, with ratty wet clothes hung all around, smelly, the crew fumed at their horrid fates and wondered why they were out here? One fellow said "if the AT was one of my ideals, I think I need to examine my other ideals...", and they were tired, wet, cold, disillusioned and in need really of only a sunny day to open up their spirits and make things OK again. Kim told me one day that the AT is one of the 10 best things she's ever done. I have to like that, if I am not giving her material security, at least I am stepping up to share some flat out adventure with her. Those memories are now etched onto the continuum. Kim has come up with a few definitions: Thru True Hikers, True Thru Hikers, and Thru Hikers. Kim and I would be Thru True Hikers as we take our time and enjoy the potential serendipity, the 20 somethings would be True Thru Hikers as they put their heads down and go, no side trips, into the goal, and a Thru Hiker is merely someone who leaves the trail at whatever point, they are through. All these distinctions perhaps speak of that we have not been out here long enough; it has not all rolled into One. The mind must compare, kind of like that old Les McCann song Real Compared to What?

At the shelters the hard weather has changed people's habits of food protection and almost all have started to eat right in their sleeping bags and no one even hangs their food on the bear cables, even though they are just 15 yards away. You'd think that if there are bear cables, then ergo, there are bears, maybe there was a problem....but hardly any SOBOs hang their food at all, ever, only on mouse hangers. I have been out west where rube handling of food over the years has resulted in everyone being mandated to carry a bear-proof canister for their food, and this is mostly for Special Forces raccoons, not bears even. The AT will probably end up like this, as no one seems to give a care about the potential negative effects on the animal's behavior or future hassles for other people and it is the same old story of convenience now and pay the piper later. It is short term over long term, immediate gratification over any slight troubling to keep food away from animals. It's the tragedy of the commons once again.

Towards the end things start to unravel and people lose their focus. The present takes a back seat to the future. The immersion and personal investment goes out of it and you start to think of what is coming next. A few phone calls and your head is 1000 miles away from the trail. For many it is like Friday afternoon at 3:30PM, can't wait to get out of the office and go home. For the heads down and grind out the miles set, it seems like it is just trading one rat race for another, all the pressure to go, go, go, finish, keep on schedule; it is more like an athletic goal then, than a possible wilderness transformative experience.

And we laughed at what we were doing but later on that night it was friggin' COLD man; wind was blowing through the zipper on my bag. The wind is always nipping at us, sometimes savagely, sometimes revealing all souls wanting to be known again, sometimes blowing you way inside a conch shell. It has at times been seriously uncomfortable and daunting and just basic comforts like warmth and still air seem like impossible luxuries. The weather is a deterrent and has probably driven many to go home. We've had lots of fires and sometimes we cook and eat desperately fast just to get that warmth in us and then brush our teeth real quick and then into the bags for an eternity of night, 12 hours of night, maybe with mice working furiously to get your TP to make nests and terrorizing the crew by crawling swiftly over people's faces and hands as they lay resting in the dark.

A few things here, hardly anyone have we seen brushing their teeth or flossing. Dental hygiene seems to be an after thought, perhaps perceived as another weight issue. There must be some dirty mouths out here, some thick, wooly Icelandic sweaters knitted around each tooth. Also, there is a feeling that the closer you get, the father away you are. In the intense desire to be there already, the moment stretches into eternity. The time between 3 and 4:30 PM can really drag for me sometimes, as can the ultimate end of the trip or the ascent of Clingman's Dome.

One day we pulled up a bit early, as we wanted to see the Waslick poplar, off on a blue blaze trail. The tree is the second biggest poplar in the USA. It is now dead but huge nevertheless. The tree speaks of virgin America, of Cherokee lands and the tree seems to bear witness to what a shame that all this land, all the plants, trees, animals and people had to be steam-rollered by the colonization of the Europeans. What an Eden it must have been, of innocence, of grandeur and majesty. And then all the big trees are cut down and the Indians slaughtered, at places we walked through. And the Cherokee were run out of Georgia on the Trail of Tears. The Supreme Court even ruled in favor of Cherokee land rights but President Jackson ordered the Indians removed, saying, "let the Supreme Court enforce it's own orders".  And now there is barley an Indian presence here in this southern land. The land has been dispossessed of its native people and its giant trees and now there are white guys like us walking through thinking about hamburgers and ice cream at the next town. I remember a quote, homo homini lupus, man is a wolf to himself. Compared to all the Civil War memorials, colonist museums and memorials to individuals who have had plaques and shelters built in their honor, there is not one word out there on a plaque or anything about the local Indians.

The adventures keep unfolding. We went through Civil War country, Indian country, through the modern south, through lawless east Tennessee, through regenerating new forests and we have met all sorts. One night, at 12:30 AM, a crew of 4 calling themselves the SOBO HOBOs came in and proceeded to make noise and crinkle bags until 2:AM. Kim talked up a blue streak with them as well, a blue streak of questions, and I slept maybe 3 hours. This AT shelter life means in many cases a chronic lack of sleep; you get tired and worn down. Now get this, we also met The King, The King of Snoring, the next night, a really nice guy but boy you could not believe the noises; The King indeed!@@^@^4%*& Could Fred get some sleep around here?  We met Easy Does It and 2 other fellows our age and it is nice sometimes to relate with my own age set. Many times the young folks just don't have much to say; they are apparently not interested in much and there is nothing to talk about whereas with my age set, the conversation flows much more naturally; we seem to be interested and engaged a little more, perhaps. I can't imagine that I have turned into an old fuddy duddy! No, it can't be that; what it is, is some kind of developmental disconnect. The shelter scene many times reveals a trashy, beat up area where people's unconscious inconsideration for others and for nature is played out in waves of high impact camping. Late arrivals disturb those already sleeping and the infernal crinkling of bags goes on, my god can those crinkling bags make a lot of noise in the still hours of night and the morning!

And the cold just kept on coming at us, cold wind like a frickin' Cro-Magnon man, ice age stuff man, the heat is sucked bloody right off you and then you face a big hill to climb and you get too hot, you strip open, strip off, undo those Velcro openings and zippers and toggles and side openings and then around one corner you hear the wind like a freight train and you must cover all up again. This goes on over and over, too hot, too cold, too many zippers, the wind unrelenting, and trolls up above the clouds, with dials and knobs turn the gloom index up another notch. Man can it get gray and gloooomy, GLOOM, dark, nowhere inside to go to for miles, "throw a little more freezing rain at them, and a bit more wind and they will pull up and camp for the day" say the trolls. How much gloom can we take? The gloom can actually be quite elegant and impressive; it is somber at high levels, sort of a nature's Peter Brueghal kind of feeling. 

Many mornings I hear Kim's footsteps on the leaves as she gets down the food, stokes the coals, as she makes coffee. They are short steps, step, step, and step. I hear her from my bag. I don't need to see; I can hear every step. I adore hearing her steps out there in the darkness of the morning. I also like Kim's morning announcement of what will be for dinner; we'll be walking along and about 9:AM she'll say, "I've decided that we'll be having...such and such." I always perk up and pay attention to the dinner announcement. "That sounds great," I say.

Every night Kim calculates our progress, the mileage, how much to the next shelter, how much food, she considers it all, what our options are. She is the trail boss and she has done very well to organize this whole trip, pack the food, administer our daily affairs and make itineraries for our future hiking, to the next food drop, how much we still have left, etc. So then if we change plans, pull up early or the weather is bad, Kim will have to recalibrate the whole situation. She has her office there, with all the maps, books and papers, glasses on, all spread before her and then a proclamation: "I've decided that...." But she is not autocratic, one thing we have learned is that it is not worth it to play a card until it's time has come; there is no need to declare how a day will unfold when we both know very well that things could change by 2:PM; we'll play that card then, being aware of our options.

One good example of this: we had almost 8 miles to go to the next shelter and it was like 1:30 PM, we could have made it before dark or by dark but it was starting to rain and it was going to turn to freezing rain or snow and we decided hey, forget that, let's stay dry and we'll deal with the lost miles tomorrow or at some other time. Good call, because that night was a spectacular ice storm that put ice over 2" thick on the trees and then it fell all night with loud crashes that sounded like trolls stamping out in the dark, as desperate mice made nests in my pack and crawled over Kim's bag. So, Kim had to recalibrate our position as a result of going a short day, to see how much was left and how much food we'd need therefore.

We got through the night just fine in a very solid shelter; the mice were a pain, but they are so small you can hardly fault them for wanting to make a living, and the worst was that we could get rabies, but then you are there, so why bemoan your fate, you got it coming one way or another; if you can't take it, go home and as dawn came to reveal a crystalline wonderland and forest floor strewn with ice ,the wind howled upon the ridge. I mean howled, roared like some hyperborean freight train, a roaring furnace of freezing temperatures and ice and we knew that this wind would challenge us, would want our warmth and we would suffer, we wanted to stay in our little shelter of a world but we had to go out into the savagery, as our food was rationed and we wouldn't even be in any shape if Rosie hadn't sent us what she did, and we pushed on, determined; the last is always the hardest, the darkest is just before the dawn.

After the ice storm the trail gully was filled with ice, with pieces of ice 2" thick or more. We walked 7 miles on a substrate of greased ball bearings, a 7-mile trench of ice cubes, everywhere, an ice machine gone wild. Lucky for us most of it had fallen by morning, as some of the ice was the size of a brick and if one of those hit you on the head, it could have been bad, hard-headed as Kim and I think each other to be at times. The weather is just putting us to the test. It seems like the farther south we go the colder and harder it gets, snow, sleet, freezing rain, ice storm, high winds, frozen ground, frozen streams and ice on the trail, driving rain, intense cold, mud, you name it, we had it. It has been tough to take gracefully sometimes. That's why that one night we just had to laugh; are we really here doing this?! Why when it is so close does it seem so far away?

And now all the names and stories in the books have blown away on winter winds, washed away by cold gray rain. This year's crew of south bounders has mostly gone. Their words and worlds live on in the books, but it is wind; they are gone; we remain, soon to be gone too; this tide has come and gone, in and out, the ocean still here for other waves of other people to come and fill these spaces with their lives in the future. The tide of the seasons moves on; we were here; we were a part of these seasons and the rhythm of the trail, of this land. We were here.

One night we pulled up at the site of an old cheese factory, from 1848, some New Englanders had a cheese production here and we decided to stay out of interest and out of tiredness too; it looked good enough for 3:30PM and Kimmie made a huge fire as she is wont to do. I feathered our nest with tarps full of leaves and made a big windbreak out of a log and out of leaves to protect us against the infernal wind and it was all good until the wind direction changed and I was again sucking wind through my zipper, oh well. The simplicity is the beauty of all of this; it is not complicated; it might be hard but it is direct and simple. You don't need to trouble your mind about things beyond your control; you just do the best you can within these certain simple parameters. It is not a rat race, it is a time to reflect and find something maybe, and maybe the value is that we can bring it back and share it, that this life is precious and that life is for living today, now brown cow, now is our time; we'll soon be gone with the wind so lets make the best of these our days under the sun. Let's pay attention to those faces that show before us and give the best of what we have to give.

So, we were on rations and heading into the last 2 days before out last resupply at Neel's Gap/ Walasi-Yi Center and we met 2 former AT hikers who gave us a block of cheese, noodles, garlic, bars, dinners and then we met Boy Scouts and their leaders started a give-away with chocolates, ham, moon pies, trail mix, candy, oatmeal and hot chocolate and we were thrilled! There is nothing that can make you hungrier than the thought that you don't have enough to eat and can't really munch out and now we had plenty. We also were once again amazed at the wonderful generosity of people and full of faith that the human race actually is good. We have found real good out here. We searched for the right site to pull up at, so we would have enough daylight to enjoy this newfound bounty and we each had separate dinners, and we hogged out big time, as Kim would say; we got stuffed to the gills. I was our second night in a row back in the tent, at a "stealth" campsite and the sun was out and life was good. Of course in the morning the wind was back with a vengeance but we knocked off a quick 13 miles and now will have 2 nights in a hostel. I'll be heading back to this hostel as soon as I finish this work and make the hitch up the hill.

Kim has arranged us a ride out of Springer Mountain at the end, from Larry, who we thought was Bullwinkle, but who does not have a trail name. Way back in VA, Kim went to get water and brought back a full bag. These other 2 fellows did not go looking way down the hill for any and we could see their water bottles were not full. Kim offered them water and one guy accepted, saying that with his high blood pressure he needed to drink lots. Larry then said, "Anyone who offers my friend water can get a ride from Springer to the bus station".  There you go, lots of good deeds and generosity, a presence, a feeling for being in the flow and then it all starts to become what they call trail magic. The trail is opportunity for people to shine and shine they do. If you could see this sort of thing counterbalance the evening news, you'd see that there really is hope; people are essentially good; here on the AT you can really see it.

AT Epilogue  12/17/05  Gainesville, GA  (AT News #9 still to come!)

Here we are at the Best Western downtown, that with tremendous generosity, Larry Bullwinkle has given us 2 nights, saving us from another ice storm, bringing around good will and Christmas spirit that so generously flow from Kim all days. As Kim told me one day, "you have to extend yourself to keep the karma going." She who is so generous is now blown away by Larry's generosity. Kim has made waves on the trail, up and down, from PA to GA, SOBO 05; she is really present and ready to give her best; she receives others, listens to them, brings them out, shows sincere interest, opens up depths and for that, people really like her. People see somebody unique. She has made waves. She is, La Contessa. As one girl thought her name was "Luck Contessa". 

So, we were pulling out our last days, the final run down, the end of the line and there I was musing over dendritic patterns in nature, branch-like shapes, of leaves, of vertebrates, of rivers, of bilateral symmetry, of reoccurring dendritic patterns in nature and it dawns on me: the human central nervous system is just such a pattern! The way we are shaped is the same as a leaf, as a river drainage, the same as maybe an ice crystal even and wow, I am like back on the continuum of all of life again. There I am all in the abstract and my actual shape IS the continuum. I am it; there is no abstraction or separation, the mentally arcane then became the real. I was like wow Fred, nice connection: primary patterns in nature, bilateral symmetry, radial symmetry, fractals, order, some sort of underlying unity that I can glimpse but not know. I glimpse it. Am I able to share this sense with you? I see a primary pattern in nature and then see that I am myself made of this same pattern. I think of my Spanish and the word rama, or branch, and then, ramification: branchification, branching out from a center and reaching out to the edges. What do my musings truly ramify? It's like rock-n-roll, I don't know but I like it. I suppose nature grows on you as you stay outside and muse upon it for months on end.

Now that I am at the Best Western and I hear lounge music and cocktail glasses tinkle, I wonder, now that I am off the trail, what will life have in store for me? What will all of this magical time portend? A sign at our last shelter at Amicalola State Park said this: "Backpacking offers freedom to the forest traveler. Everyday worries and pressures are diminished. You become a part of a scenic landscape and survive in a primitive environment with few modern conveniences. Self-sufficient, yes, but with this freedom goes an individual responsibility to care for the environment and respect the rights of those you meet along the way and those who follow you."  I read: hiking your own hike means cleaning up after yourself and being easy on the land and also being able to see outside your own box to respecting other's sensibilities. We can be free only so far before we compromise the freedom of others and therefore, freedom becomes not only about what we make/take for ourselves but also about what we can give to others.

I couldn't help but notice the whole trip that there were faces on the tree trunks and in the leaves, on the rocks, on acorns; everywhere there were shapes and faces. They reminded me of Norse gods, of the dragon heads on Viking ships, of Pacific NW Indian art emerging out of the waves, trees and animals. And shoot, here I am an old white guy swimming in masks of animism, seeing spirits and finding ethereal sacred significances in the mundane. How can this be? I am just a house painter! I am out in the woods and the woods start to speak to me. I've always had a strong imagination and now it gets unleashed on a forest full of faces of mythological proportions. As I look out I understand then just how Tolkien conceived of the Lord of the Rings, how C.S. Lewis conceived of Narnia; it is all there waiting to be seen. It's there; I saw it myself. That stuff is latent in Nature.

On one of the last days, we got to a gap and Kim knew the road went to Suches, GA. We had decided to bypass Suches for a food drop but now she was curious, she said "could we go down and see what it might have been?" I said, "let's hitch for 10 minutes and if we get an ride, we'll go, lets' try another dip into serendipity". And lo and behold the first truck stops and we are in the back, in ice cold wind, down to Suches, GA. We got into the store and Kim did her usual and cased the whole place out meticulously, searching for the unique, the best deal, needing to see everything in the whole store and we ended up with a few packs of sliced ham, sliced cheese, rolls, Doritos crackers and also in the store we each had 2 hot dogs and a chicken salad sandwich and a Coke. As we sat at our table, an old fellow, 77 actually, named Frank, came and sat with us and told us of impending bad weather. An ice storm was on the way, more freezing rain to spice up our grand finale. Frank was great, a fighter pilot, an Eastern pilot, a motorcycle driver and Kim brightened his world and he hers. I just have to watch all this sometimes, and throw in a comment every now and again. Kim says that the both of us impress people when we get it going. When we were done eating, Frank asked if we were purists? No we said, we yellow blaze; we are heretics; we exercise choice in a rigid world. Frank then said that Forest Service Road 42 would take a mile or so off our walk and we said OK and he said "throw your stuff in the back of the red truck and I'll take you up there." That was pretty neat; we both liked Frank a lot and off we were up the road, now seeing not just trees but Georgia homesteads and getting a flavor for the local life. At whatever gap, we were back on the white blazes and soon enough at Gooch Shelter where there was a homeless hiker named Hiker X 05. He was smoking Top cigarettes one after the other and was a little desperate looking, not you average dirty yuppie, as we pretend to be, even though we are closer to the bottom along with Hiker X 05 than to most of my compatriots. We are just a couple of 1000 bucks from Hiker X 05. Kim somehow intuited the hunger of Hiker X 05, as he Yogied 2 ham and cheese sandwiches in short order along with much other food. We did him right, with Mountain Money, real money, food and even cooked his water for him to save him fuel, we got it, we gave it. We also all battled the mice together and gave them hell real good in the morning.

That night it rained big time and as the morning came, it started to turn to ice. By daylight there was a small and elegant coating of ice on the trees and plants. We were going to go; no way were we going to hole up with the end so close and with the unresolved issue of the location of our bus tickets pending. We went around 3 miles on the trail to a gap and then decided to walk FS Road 42 to the next gap and then reassess. As we went up, the ice came and grew thicker and more present. All that rain the night before had iced things over pretty good up at elevation. The road itself was frozen and walking was difficult with only traction on the side, on frozen but crunchy leaves or in streams of water flowing down infrequent but fresh tire tracks. The walking was tough and we soon realized that it would have been near impossible on the trail. As we gained elevation the ice became thicker and thicker and branches began to snap and fall off, big branches broke and fell. It was still freezing raining. We were in a foggy forest of ice, a crystalline wonderland, and trudging mile after mile through draping white arbors of frozen, bent over trees. BIG trees were bent all the way over under tremendous loads of ice. Close up you could see buds encased in ice, somehow it was forbidden, odd, unreal, crazy, to see this life stuck inside of ice and have it be so clear, so magnified. Could this be a cryogenic wonderland?  The surroundings were truly enchanted and yet tinged with the real flavor of danger. More and more branches cracked and fell off and whole trees were coming down with the ensuing massive cracking explosion of tons of shattering ice. Ice crashed and trees shuddered and groaned. We happened to be in an area where they train Army Rangers and so in the background there is machine gun fire! Crash, boom, wham, and then rat tat tat ata ata tat, machine guns are going off Kim! Can we laugh yet? Is this a war zone?  And then wham! Kim is down on her back; is she hit? No, she just tripped. Where is Rambo? Where is Arnold? "Captain, Kim is down and we are taking fire from all sides and ice artillery is coming in from all directions!!!!!!" All we could do was to push on, as there was no "inside" to go to. We had to get to the next shelter, our last one on the AT, Springer Mountain Shelter. We did get there at about 4 PM and it was one hell of a tough walk, the last bit through an incredible ice encrusted forest. This ice storm was magnitudes stronger than our last one.

A number of Army guys drove by as we walked on and they stopped to see if we were OK, or crazy. Kim asked one guy for some gloves, as desperate mice had dragged off one of her gloves the night before. The first guy said to ask if we needed anything. The second guy gave her his gloves. Another group of hunters offered us a ride off the mountain. Another fellow did give us a ride a few miles at the last, as we were whipped. You could pause and look up into a huge oak and see monstrous ice-laden branches that would have killed you had they fallen. Guess I better keep moving, but then there are just more of them up ahead. You can't really believe that you would die, not me, not Kim, and we skated, doing a total of 13 miles on an icy foray onto Springer Mountain. We skated, thank God. We're alive for another day.

We were pretty well drenched from walking in this freezing rain and again, the Gortex did not perform; Montrail did not perform; nothing performed and I was wet in my bag, but warm. AT the shelter was another really nice guy, Diamond Dave and he made a fire out of all those icy branches. I owe him 5 bucks for that.

Still, the ice was an incredible treat, just magical, so much ice on everything and then at the last of the day to the shelter, up through rivers and streams of ice water, over rocks encrusted with ice, through cold mud, with our Montrail boots failing miserably and our socks squishing inside, beating back huge ice covered bushes, crack! Smack! Whoa! And this is the end, a wicked, spectacular ice storm to sparkle and twinkle the imagination with a brilliant spectacle tinged with danger, beauty and death.

A special treat was a pee call under a full moon with this white light shimmering and sparkling in the creaking aloneness of night. The full moon light glittered inside and upon endless ice and rustling trees. This was really something, alone at night, full moon, and forest of ice, nice. Ice crashed on the shelter roof, startling me into a yell from deep sleep. Whoa!!!!  Trees groaned and creaked like below decks on an Age of Discovery wooden ship, tap, crack, squeak, icy trees rubbing the shelter and we are tucked in snugly in the loft, snoring even. Can we laugh at that? YES! Am I on the Discovery in Puget Sound? Is Captain Vancouver calling?

And then the sunrise, oh man you haven't seen anything like that. And I had no more pictures. Nature said, "this one is so special there will be no pictures here, this is a show just for you." The sun rose after we did our 12 hours in the sack, a cherry frosted ice sunrise of pink cotton candy ice, glimmering and twinkling; what a sight! The pink shown through branches encased in 2" prisms of ice, changing then to orange, then yellow, then white, framed against pure stark blue and fading then to pure silver light that shone through creaking and crackling sound in cold and crisp air.

I thought of Ken Nordine, "What does your sparkle, truly portend, shimmering brilliance, light without end."

With my imagination still ripe in spite of the cold I saw incarnations of ice dragons with icicle fangs; a forest thick with dragons and mythical crystalline creatures of all sizes and shapes. I saw Peter Rosen and the gumdrop tree, a forest of white gumdrop trees. A giant Peter Rosen above eating all the gumdrops from my first grade birthday party. Every now and then would be a perfect white Christmas tree, draped totally with ice and icicles, just crisp and amazing.  Kim said, "You can see how they thought of Christmas trees."  Ice encrusted trees lurched as if creatures trapped by cold in icy armor. Endless buds lay encased inside like some phantasmagoric cryogenic deep freeze. Is that life in there? And above are swinging shapes of ancient fish, of ichthyosaurs, of laughing apparitions of icy jaws hanging, of dragons, of Norse gods, of unknown monsters leering. Extinct stags once again roamed with complete abandon; grotesque mouths and faces gaped and bobbed up and down. It's Narnia! It's a tree flush with ALL imagination; all only to fall to pieces in chunks brittle crackling, a fantastic puzzle falls apart magic melting, imagination smelting. Our crunching footsteps down the trail led on and below our feet lay the remains, twigs and branches snapped off, encased in ice as if some mad experiment gone wrong, as if some child's game discarded, as if aftermath of some god's game.

Prisms of a million sparkles drip; buds lay still inside magic mirrors dripping; the whole spectrum flashes and twinkles bright amidst pure silver light. And still, Narnia was not all warm and fuzzy and magic, these falling ice bricks could kill, a whole branch one of us might not be able to even move, but we skated with Luck Contessa. In total we hiked about 16 miles of pure tough walking through a tremendous ice storm. Trees, branches and bushes were slung all over creating an obstacle course of incredible proportion. Kim lost her cool at one point; the ice dragons put a spell on her as she fought furiously through an ice thicket. I watched water run under ice covered tree trunks, down to hidden icy pathways that we had traversed. The endless shapes and forms made for a trip as far as wonder and imagination could go.

And then just like that it's gone, we're below it and into the brown leaves again, into the friendly organic, home as it were, out of the alien and into the soft and accepting brownness of old leaves crunching. We pulled it into Amicalola Sate Park and got oriented, saw pictures of our friends who had finished on the wall, Mechanical Man, Wanderer, Blaze, High Mountain, and we settled into the shelter there at the Park.

The AT and Nature gave us a splendid grand finale and with no pictures to own and hoard, no experience to manipulate later, this must be remembered as our special finish to a great trip. We are thankful for the many blessings we have had.

It's over when you permanently enter the ranks of the clean, being dirty and out there in the woods is your membership card to the club, when that dirt gets washed off, you're done with that chapter. We showered this morning and made a nice big fire, Kim went to do laundry, the bus tickets came, Larry came and here we are, poised to go, Kim to her Mom's in North Carolina, me to VT and NJ. Randy will get me in White River; I'll see Mom for Xmas, work for George Hano; we'll go to Tucson, Mexico, Saline Valley near Death Valley, go to George Thompson and like That Guy just intimated in an e-mail, it's not over, it's just beginning. 

Addendum:

e-mail correspondence from Russ aka Barrio Barri:

I can hear it, Fred. I hear it better and better with each AT missive, the song of the trail, the song of the seasons, the song of life swimming by, the song of the real compared to what? My real, your real, Durga's real, Kim's real, the true through hiker's real, the through true hiker's real. All of our reals, part of the one big real. Your

incessant wind, one with the anxious faces of my students at the end

of term, the many grasshoppers who played through the summer and now

it's Mr. Healy, Mr. Healy, Mr. Healy what can I do to PASS?! And I like

you, must accept all, for what use is it carping at the wind? So we talk

about school and life and my little corner of what's important, and

sometimes theirs. I had a student last year, Jorge Zuniga Trahin, the nicest guy you'd

ever meet. Funny, smart, easygoing, friendly. Drove most of his teachers

nuts 'cause he never did any work, but I could never talk to him without

thinking, "George is doing fine." He has a wonderful girl friend,

Jade, also one of my favorite students. George is no longer in school, but

Jade ran up to me yesterday saying Mr. Healy, Mr. Healy, George got a

present for you. So I open up the wrapping and its a Jerry Garcia

doll, stuffed, w/ cardboard accoustic Ibanez-a beautiful likeness. She

said, "George saw that and said, Mr. Healy would love that." They got me

some incense to go with it. I quote you: "Let's pay attention to those

faces that show before us and give the best of what we have to give." This

in some form is my daily mantra. Sometimes the pedant in me, the one who

thinks he has the answers, wanted to lay in to George for not working

in school, but while that sometimes feels needed with some students, it

never did with him. I just want to try to give them all the best of

what I have to give, whatever my lights tell me that is. Trail magic comes

in many forms, but it's all one.

I can see your face before me now, and Kim's. Thank you for paying

attention and sharing your AT experience so splendidly. It has meant

a lot to me, my old friend. I have a feeling I know you now better than

ever. Your writing brings another wrinkle to our mutual lifeline. I

am filled with the spirit! I may never walk the AT, but what you say of

it  sets my heartstrings vibrating like a Jerry twang, and I feel its

resonance in my own being.

We can't wait to welcome you to our hearth.

Happy hiking, stay warm, love to you and Kim, and we hope to see you

soon.

Love,  Barri