Day 96, 97: How we learned not to give a shit.

Day 96:

I wake up about an hour before sunrise because everyone else on the observation deck has decided to do the same (and the stirring of other hikers is almost impossible to sleep through). So I force myself to get up and watch the damn thing, remembering a post that Swami (www.thehikinglife.com) made about never missing a sunset or sunrise. As a side note, my favorite fictional character of all time (Drizzt Do'Urden) never misses a sunrise either. I realize that I rarely get to see a sunset or sunrise unobstructed by innumerable trees and vegetation and am extremely bummed by this fact. After taking the obligatory sunrise pictures, we all go back to sleep in a monumental feat of pure, unadulterated laziness.

It's now almost noon and we're laying out in the sun by a public beach. This particular beach happens to have been 0.3 miles from where we slept. The old me would be freaking out about mileage and not being able to finish by a certain date and blahblahblah, but the new me is eating cookies and trying to take a nap on a bench whilst my phone charges inside the concession building.

This new found disregard for putting in miles isn't entirely motivated by sloth. Stevie's been having some bowel issues similar to my experiences with giardia and so we're moving slower than normal (and we like to hang out around real-people toilets for extended periods of time to help negate the indignity of spraying shit on your heels whilst squatting in the woods).

Regardless, we can't stop. We must always move forward. The need (aka anxiety) to move from point A to point B still rattles my subconscious, but I'm learning how to make myself temporarily deaf to it. The Pull of Katahdin eventually pushes its way to the surface and threatens to overwhelm my sense of purpose and well being, but I'm getting better and better at combating this inevitability.

It's not all about the miles, right?

The hike today is weird. We go through a lot of backyards, over a lot of roads, and walk a few miles next to a straight up nasty ass swamp. The mosquitoes are perpetually out in force and Cheyanne's lemon eucalyptus bug spray is proving itself not to be strong enough to repel the legions of vampiric little fuckers.

We fill up our water for the rest of the day at a spigot on the side of an abandoned house just off the side of the trail and gulp it down silently hoping that it didn't need to be treated (it came from a spigot, right? right?). Oh well, it's at least better than drinking from the swamp.

The shelter this night has a few familiar faces including Fin, Tumbles, and Scout. Tumbles and Scout are a teenage brother/sister combo and Fin is the thruhiker with the Worst Luck Ever. He got norovirus around Waynesboro and shortly after got lyme disease. Yeah, that's right, I said lyme. But he's still out here, albeit with a much more morbid sense of humor. Fin's motto is Death or Katahdin, and I honestly think there's a reason that Death comes before Katahdin within the sentence structure.

Day 97:

We sleep in the shelter. This is a horrible, terrible idea, and I know it.

All of my exposed skin is relentlessly assaulted by mosquitoes (duh) and so I try to contain myself wholly within my quilt... which isn't a solution because then my body is on fire and it's way too hot to sleep anyhow.

So I let myself get bit by mosquitoes (and probably ticks) all night. Bring it on West Nile, I ain't scared.

Stevie informs me that there's blood in his poopoo shortly after I wake. This is a game changer. You can't ignore something like that. So we make new plans, we can hitch to an urgent care in six miles and spend the night at a free (read: donation based) hiker hostel in Vernon, NJ.

So this is where I am, right at this moment, listening to Leann Womack's I Hope You Dance (because I'm a total weirdo) on repeat whilst typing this blog on the community computer. And god dang it's way easier to type these entries out on a keyboard rather than a phone.

Today wasn't a total waste, besides all the boring shit like laundry, shower, pharmacy, and hitching, we also found a health food store for the first time since forever ago and got to indulge ourselves. I got some root beers and coconut milk ice cream to make root beer floats on account of it being my birthday in approximately two hours.

What do I plan on doing for my birthday? Well, I'll do what I always do, spend the day in an existential stupor, thinking about the abstract but profound psychological impact that changing an integer can have. I know that tomorrow, in all reality, I'll be one day older, but my age will change to 27, forever altering my perception of how long I've been alive... that much closer to thirty... that much closer to forty... that much closer to death.

Yeah, age is an abstraction and a social construct and all that bullshit. But the health of my body and the health of my mind have very real limitations and I'm getting closer to reaching those limitations every day. And birthdays are a reminder of the finite reality of our lives. 

But it's not growing older that bothers me, it's looking back on my life and seeing that I've wasted so much of it. So much time, so much energy, and what I come to regret most is not what I've done, but what I didn't do.

However, I have one strong ally on my side. That ally being less of a physical entity and more of the fact that I'm in the middle of a 2200 mile journey through the fucking mountains.

So maybe it's way past time I kicked this self destructive birthday tradition to the curb. Death is inevitable and all that shit, but fuck it, right now, right this moment, I'm alive and vigorous, and I can't reiterate it enough... I will not squander my life.

"Cause I don't want to have to look back and say... 'Make me young, make me young!'"

- Blue Monday & Kilgore Trout