103:
The trail is relatively easy at this point and I'm cruisin'. With no need to process each individual footstep my mind becomes almost completely occupied by my audiobook.
Late into the afternoon we get to another public beach. These places are so dense with convenience that thruhikers can't escape, much like light can't escape a black hole. I mean, they've got free showers, a concession stand, and power outlets. We literally need nothing else.
Needless to say, we spend way too much time there and suddenly our entire "bubble" shows up, caught in the tractor beam of overpriced Gatorade and potable water from a spigot. Before I know it I'm listening to same three ukelele chords over and over and over. We gotta go.
Our camp this night is a shelter that was once a cabin but has had one wall knocked down and a porch put in its place. This seems like an awesome place to spend the evening, except that everyone else in the world is there already. Oh, and it's literally right next to a road... but this has its benefits. Namely, you can order Chinese food delivered directly to the shelter, and sure enough a laminated menu can be found inside the shelter next to the hiker log.
In an act of extreme self destruction, we all order Chinese food and soda. I fall asleep waiting on dinner to be delivered (what a marvelous luxury!), but before long, Stevie rouses me, a Buddha Delight with garlic sauce (gluten free, duh) in hand. I eat with blatant disregard for my intestinal health and pass out again, letting my cardiovascular system sort out whether sleep or digestion is more important.
104:
We set out early (again), but the motivation is gone (again). What is motivation anyway? At this point I'm finishing this trail for no reason other than that I fucking said I would.
I sit down to wait on Cheyanne and Stevie at an undrinkable water source. It's downstream from a cow pasture, and you can tell, if not by the look then by the smell. A seated hiker always attracts more of our kind and soon enough I'm making fun of Fin's compass. Who uses a compass on the AT?! We only look at elevation maps. At my provocation, Fin shows me that he actually has two compasses, one of which is on his whistle. I give him a look of extreme disapproval and say, "Two? Really? C'mon man."
He replies, "I'm a fucking survivalist man."
This is the funniest thing I've ever heard, and I laugh an inappropriate amount of time. Fin has gotten both norovirus and lyme, his body is literally falling apart on him, and he does very little to stop it from happening. The night prior, Cheyanne witnessed him wake up at 2:00 AM and chug a two liter of Pepsi then promptly fall back asleep. This is why we like Fin. He's dying, just like us, laughing the whole way to hell.
A few hours later, I walk half a mile off trail to a deli that I can't eat anything at to use 1) a water spigot and 2) their bathroom. The spigot is whack, but it's my only option (other than the cow pasture) and there's no bathroom. Shit, literally. It's an emergency. I half run, half power walk into some nearby trees and let loose, keeping an eye on the parking lot and hoping no one witnesses me in my depravity.
If you've been keeping up with me, you know that I've been having intestinal problems for some time. I thought they were over, but either the remnants of giardia are still doing their best to destroy my comfort or something more insidious is going on. At this point I'm convinced that I have some sort of worms living inside my gut.
With this in mind, I continue walking, headphones in, talking to myself. "It's not killing you. You're fine. How bad do you want it? That's what it comes down to. It's not killing you. You can still hike 20 miles a day. You can finish this trail. It's just discomfort. How bad do you want it? How bad? How bad do you want it?"
I turn around to find someone just behind me, discovering that another thruhiker has just borne witness to me in a moment of true and total insanity. That's fine. He knows already. We're all fucking insane. We have to be to still be doing this.
I find a big tree, the largest oak on the AT, and take my first picture in two days (since the pirate ship). I'm always unsatisfied with tree pictures. There's no way to accurately portray how fucking huge these behemoths really are.
It's late evening, I walk over the AT railroad and into a gardening store, Native Landscapes. They have our food boxes and we have to find somewhere to camp. The only problem is that there's only two places to set up tents, by the railroad or by the highway. I choose the highway, but I'm still a dozen feet from the railroad.
We walk over half a mile in the dark along the side of the highway to another deli that we can't eat anything at. I get my usual, some chips. As a child my mom would warn me that consuming too much of any one thing would eventually cause you to morph into that one thing and I start to wonder when I'll turn into a bag of chips. Hopefully I'll be salt and vinegar. I also wonder when the other thruhikers are going to turn into packages of shelf stable spam. Maybe they'll turn into cigarettes. Maybe they're already a combination of the two... They certainly smell like it. And sometimes they look like it.
We walk back to our tents, dressed in dark colors, Stevie flashing his headlamp at incoming cars so they don't kill us.
I fall asleep with my hand in a bag of chips, only to wake up in a panic fifteen minutes later, a train flying by 80 miles per hour, horn blaring. This is a terrifying experience, one that would repeat itself many times. At several points the sound of the incoming train and highway traffic enters my dreams and I'm totally convinced that I'm going to get hit by a train (or semi) in my tent. Afterwards I anxiously pass out, not entirely sure that I won't die a horrible death this night.
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