Day 122: Salvation is free.

Life on the AT is a constant struggle between injury and convalescence, health and illness, and in that regards, it's no different than normal life. Only, the possibility for injury/illness is much higher and it leans towards that end of the spectrum more often than not. Also, not like real life is the fact that regardless of malady, we still have to get up and move forward, miles and miles forward, every day.

Today is one of those days for me. All of my clothes are wet, I feel fatigued and somewhat sick, but the need to move forward is a higher priority. If you sit around for too long and think about how much it's going to suck, you'll never get anywhere, so it's better to adopt the mantra "ain't nothin' to it but to do it".

So I'm doing it.

Along the way we run into a clearing filled with cairns of all shapes and sizes. I'm not sure what the reason is, but it seems like the tradition in this area is to build a cairn before moving onward. Well, all the rocks are used up so instead I just take some pictures.

The weather isn't bad, and I honestly don't feel horrible, so I'm moving along at a somewhat decent pace, even though Stevie is far ahead of me. I walk up on him eating at a shelter and decide to hike out before him, knowing that I plan on going slow. I pass up eating as well, since I'm certain that snacks will only make my problems worse.

I make it to the top of a climb before I realize that not eating was a horrible, terrible, absolutely awful idea. I bonk so hard that I honestly don't know if I can go any farther, my hands are shaking, and I don't know what's wrong with me. With a sense of urgency and worry, I down all my remaining snacks for the day, Stevie passing me up along the way. I eat two macro bars, some coconut oil, almond butter, and two chocolates in about a five minute period.

This turns out to be worse than bonking, and almost immediately I feel like complete shit.

A few hours later it's getting dark, thunder is booming somewhere behind me, and I know that I'm not going to make it to the shelter. Sitting on the side of the trail, trying to gather energy and willpower enough to make it the final push in the dark, a local couple walks up on me.

We talk for a bit and they inform me that there's a "secret" shelter just off trail in a really short amount of time.

Secret shelter?! You mean I don't have to hike in the dark anymore and potentially get rained on and I can be alone and have intestinal problems alone and not be crazy uncomfortable around every other hiker on the trail?!

The shelter turns out to be weird. Real weird. First of all it's immediately off a logging road behind an abandoned tractor. Someone has obviously decorated the place, whether that be local kids or what, I have no idea. There's burned up candles everywhere, animal skulls, and random bits of what would otherwise be considered trash loosely strung up around the place. But it's a shelter. It has a roof, and I'm there, and I'm tired. And just I start to relax, it begins to rain.

But I made it. Sanctuary. I'm dry, I'm safe, and I might feel better tomorrow. So I drift off to sleep listening to the steady drum of rain on a tin roof.

Day 121: Pause.

It's raining. We knew this was going to happen, and in anticipation, every other hiker sleeps in. You see, we're all really cozy in our fully enclosed ski hut, and after awhile out here, you learn that you don't have to force yourself to be uncomfortable, because uncomfortable will seek you out on its own.

Regardless, we eventually venture out into the rain, and man does it suck. A steady all day downpour. We haven't been in one of these in awhile, and I'm thankful for that. After a few hours I find a shelter and hunker down amongst the other hikers (also seeking shelter) long enough to take my shoes off and let my corpse feet (this is what we call feet that have been submerged in water for far too long) gain back some of their normal color. It's futile, soon eough I'll put my feet back into my wet socks and shoes, but it's nice to let them dry out occasionally.

Whilst this is happening, I notice that three hikers, neatly tucked away in sleeping bags, are watching a movie on an iPad. I spy over one of their shoulders for way too long, trying to absorb some of their warmth and comfort.

But then I head back out into The Endless Rain.

It sucks. But it's okay, because it's nothing we haven't dealt with before.

A few miles away from the shelter Stevie and Cheyanne leave me behind. I'm having some issues and I really, really don't feel well, so I sit on the side of a road for about an hour, trying to figure out what's wrong with me (for the thousandth time) on my phone, desperately googling symptoms, trying all sorts of combinations. It's always the same, it could either be everything (probably cancer though, duh), or nothing at all. Most likely it's somewhere in the middle.

By the time I get up to start hiking again, I'm sure that Cheyanne and Stevie have already made it to the shelter. I'm frustrated. Frustrated by all of this. By not feeling well, by being left behind, by having no fucking idea what's wrong with me. Frustrated with the three hospital visits I've made for the same reason. Frustrated with the money I paid a bunch of professional idiots to tell me what I already know. Frustrated that no one knows what's going on, and yet still I suffer and hike 20 miles a day.

With this in mind, I put on some crunchy tunes and basically take off running. Hatebreed satisfies my mood quite thoroughly and as I stomp down the trail, Jamey Jasta hits me with motivational lines like "perseverance, against all opposition, persevance, crushing all limitations" and "you wanna see me fail, you won't get your chance, you wanna see me fail, you'll never get your chance" and "this is now, how can I change tomorrow if I can't change today, this is now, if I control myself I control my destiny".

I feel like shit. My body is wracked with discomfort and the serpent that lives in my stomach writhes with every jarring step, but I force myself forward, concentrating on the task, on the cadence, on every foot step, and soon enough the pain and aches and discomfort fades to background noise. At some point I start chanting, "I will finish this fucking trail."

"I will finish this fucking trail. I will finish this fucking trail. I will. Finish. This fucking. Trail. I. Will. Finish. This. Fu-. -King. Trail."

I get to the shelter at Little Rock Pond. It's full, duh, it always is when it rains, and I never finish hiking early enough to get a place in one. So I set up my tent, cook food, and don't say a word to anyone. My movements are methodical and it's obvious that I'm in a bad mood. I want to get all of my chores for the morning done tonight, so I head over to the pond to grab some water.

It's dark at this point, and the rain has finally stopped. Toads and frogs leap out of my way as I make my way towards the beach. At the beach there's a canoe and a paddle, and I contemplate getting aboard for a bit, but no, I have to sleep.

I dip my bladder into the water and notice something. There are dozens of crawdads, huge crawdads, and dozens of salamanders (the adult version of the common eft stage newt). They're all swimming around just below the surface, but the water is so clear and my headlamp is so bright that it seems as if they're just... levitating. Gently moving about, a whole community of living things, content in their silence, in their stillness.

I pause.

And then, I just sit there.

Sometimes I forget why I'm out here, and I become wholly, obsessively focused on hiking, on the miles, on the need to finish, and on the pain it's causing me. I busy myself with chores and tasks and goals, and I rarely stop in my singleminded determination.

But sometimes I remember why I'm here. Other times it gets thrown in my face. And tonight the latter happened.

I sit on the beach for an incredibly long time. Watching the green salamanders and the more ambiguously colored crawdads, the minnows, the perch, and the toads, the frogs. I watch them move about in their less busy lives, doing what they always do, showing up after a rain, drawn to the vast amount of water that's seemingly everywhere, being so stereotypical in their ways. And I liked it.

I don't hurt anymore. I don't worry anymore. I go to sleep.

Day 120: Even if it destroys me.

120:

I've been playing phone tag with the hospital back in Bennington all week. They'll call and leave me a voicemail with no real information... So I'll call them back (from a mountain top most often, the irony of thruhiking is that reception is best up high) and they'll ask if they can call me back... And I'll say no, I live in the woods... And they'll say, oh okay... And then the cycle repeats itself three or four more times that day. So no results yet.

In the meantime, I pick up some more witch potions (tinctures) from Manchester Center, VT, where we spend most the day, trying to figure out our resupply.

Honestly, I'm a hundred thousand times more comfortable taking tinctures than pharmaceuticals, but I just want someone to tell me what's wrong with me.

I've come to the realization that thruhiking is inherently self destructive. Or maybe it's not thruhiking, maybe it's the obsessive personality that allows someone like me to finish a task or complete a goal regardless of the consequences to their own health and well being. I'm a person of extremes, and I don't really believe in compromise, especially not with commitments (like the one I made to myself to finish this trail).

So I will (I will!) finish this trail. 

Even if I totally destroy myself in the process. Just wait and see.

Our hike out of Manchester Center is short and steep, and I love it, even if I don't feel totally up to par.

Apparently we're climbing to the top of a ski resort, and near the top the trail busts out into a ski slope. It's still insanely steep and I can't help but fantasize about snowboarding (which I haven't done in years, snowboarding that is, not fantasizing).

Then it happens. I turn around, and unobstructed by trees or foliage are mountains. Huge, beautiful mountains. My god, how I've missed you.

Our camp tonight is on top of Bromley, the ski resort of which I spoke, inside a ski hut.

The top of this mountain is basically a bald, and the views are incredible, regardless of the spaceship (ski lift).

The hut is fully enclosed (so luxurious) and it soon attracts every hiker in the area, sobo, nobo, long trail, whatevs.

Me, Stevie, and Cheyanne take over a small room that is maybe a pantry in the winter months, and I fall asleep to the sound of southbounders playing Egyptian ratscrew (card game), in which they slap the shit out of the table. It's frustrating, but whatever, I'll never see any of them again.

Day 118, 119: It's not all dark.

118, 119 (are much the same):

I wake up unscathed, no beaver attacks just yet, and get an early start on the day.

The most noticeable difference between Vermont and the last 1000 miles is that we're finally doing significant climbs again. You'd think this would kill my motivation, but there's something about the pure physical endeavor of pushing myself up a mountain that allows me to silence my mind, and even my mind's worry about my body, and just embrace the task at hand.

And the pay offs are getting better.

The mountain tops, although not bald, are covered in massive pine trees, and the smell is immensely pleasant. But no mountain in the northeast is complete without a firetower, and in that regard, Vermont delivers.

The trees are insane green. The clouds, a fluffy white layer in an otherwise perfect blue. The mountains form various layers of silhouette across the horizon, promises of what's to come.

I know my posts have been dark as of late, but that's the reality of the situation, life is dark sometimes. I'm telling my experience as it happens, and what sort of adventure would it be if there wasn't hardship? If there wasn't suffering? It wouldn't be any adventure at all.

But it's not all suffering, it's not all misery.

Yeah, sometimes we slip on wet rocks and twist our ankles into oblivion and shit our pants and cry for no reason, but we also take off sprinting down mountains (when our pack weight is low enough to allow this), bounding off rocks, laughing like an insane person the whole way. Sometimes we can't hike because we laugh too hard at our own stupid inside jokes (Slender Mane, album coming soon), sometimes we make fart noises into the pure pitch dark of night just to see if anyone else is awake in their tent, sometimes we walk through fields after a rainstorm and the most massive rainbow is arcing across the sky hovering vibrantly above clouds painted orange and lavender by a setting sun while a small group of deer (and unicorns, sometimes) leap away through the tall grass and into the trees.

So you see, it's not all dark.

Day 117: Back on track... Ish.

I haven't been able to poop anything substantial, and the hospital won't take a stool sample unless it's "mostly diarrhea", so first thing in the morning I chug a nasty amount of magnesium powder and unleash all hell in the bathroom of the natural foods store.

What a weird part of my life, sitting on the bathroom floor, scooping poop out of my plastic "hat" into little glass vials.

I only have an hour to get my stool to the lab, and it's 20 miles up the way. The timer starts ticking.

If you're from my generation, you're familiar with a video game called "Ocaria of Time". In this game, there's a series of quests to obtain a badass sword, the Big Goron Sword. In order to obtain it, you have to run all around the world in order to fulfill a prescription for eye drops to give to a Big Goron to get him to forge you this sword. Whilst this is happening, a timer is ticking down on your television screen, letting you know how much time you have left before you fail your quest.

But I digress.

I have to get my stool sample (eye drops) to the hospital within the hour so that I can receive a prescription for nasty pharmaceuticals (Big Goron Sword). With that knowledge in mind, I get on the road and stick a thumb out.

First hitch is weird and I try to hide my paper bag of poop samples behind my real pack whilst a man with a severe accent talks right through his blaring radio. I only catch bits and pieces of what he's saying, but I get the feeling he's a total weirdo whilst the radio exclaims "she's a super freak, super freak, she's super freaky".

Second hitch is equally weird and an old man from a sketchy motel offers to take me up the hospital. He's not going that way but he's bored and saw I needed a ride. Hmm. He doesn't let me talk at all but barrages me with questions about my hike, warning me of the perils of bears, and lions, and tigers, and all that other crap that nonhikers think is dangerous.

I barely make it to the hospital in time, but I complete my quest and now I have to hitch back, get on trail and catch up to Cheyanne and Stevie. Bleh.

Hitch back turns out to be from a geologist that is familiar with my grandfather and great grandfather, both semi famous geologists. Life is weird and the world is small.

When I get to the trail, I push myself hard, all the while the serpent that lives in my stomach coils and churns my insides to cottage cheese. Ugh, I can't wait for this to end. Regardless, I catch Stevie and Cheyanne before the end of the day and we camp at a much too full shelter (on account of northbounders, southbounders, and long trailers all converging on one point) with a "beaver problem". Apparently beavers are aggressive, who knew? I sit in my tent, listening hard for the beavers I know are lurking in the dark, waiting to destroy my shelter in an attempt to get to my food... Or maybe even me. Who knows, they might be down to eat humans with those big ol' teeth, but only after they beat me into submission with their huge waffle tails.

It could happen.

Day 116: Oh no.

Something is wrong. Something has been wrong with me for a thousand miles. It come and it goes, and now it's back with a vengeance.

I sleep awful, disturbed by dreams of a serpent living in my stomach (sensory input much?). I'm awake early and stare at the blue cuben fiber of my tent for way too long before breaking camp and heading out ahead of my crew to seek refuge in Williamstown, MA. There's a hospital and a natural foods store there, either one might offer me relief, either in the form of knowledge or witchcraft (tinctures).

It's an easy three miles into town and an easy two mile hitch.!

Oh no, the hospital doesn't take walk ins. Oh no, the store doesn't have tinctures. Oh no, the nearest walk in clinic is 20 miles away.

I'm loitering in the health food store when a little old lady offers to drive me up to Bennington, VT to the clinic. Cool. She even waits on me whilst I'm being seen by a doctor. This is my third doctor's visit for this particular problem and it's more of the same. "Have you drank any contaminated water? Like water from a stream." I almost laugh in their face every time. Yeah, nothing but contaminated water, but don't worry, I push it through a 2 ounce filter before I drink it. They push on my stomach in various spots, no it doesn't hurt doc. No, I've never had surgery, yes I have my appendix, no I have never had diverticulitis. They want to do a stool sample, this is what I'm here for, to get a stool sample. Nice, they give me some weird containers to put my shit into, and a "hat". The hat is a piece of plastic you put on a toilet seat to catch your feces. Gross. I put it on my head and ask if I'm wearing it right. One nurse thinks I'm funny, the other thinks I'm an idiot.

The little old lady's name is Rachel and she says she's really into "community justice". She has a public access show called Solution's Rising. The drive back to Williamstown is pleasant and we talk about why fracking sucks, environmental racism, and social justice issues.

The rest of my day is spent in a hotel on a toilet seat with the bathroom door open watching reality television shows from my porcelain throne. 

It could be worse.

Day 115: Mount Greylock.

We have a 21 mile day planned, so we're up early, only pausing to get some coffee on the way out of town.

We have a couple miles of road walking which is a blessing and a curse. It's easy to walk fast on concrete but it completely tears the tread off your trail runners.

Even though we have a significant amount of elevation gain (about 4000 feet), we're still moving fast. The promise of Mount Greylock (our first real mountain in a long while) is a sweet reward, and I get to the top at about 4:00 PM only to find crowds of tourists walking in slow circles around what appears to be a wizard's tower.

I stand around with my phone out, obviously trying to take pictures, patiently waiting for the tourists to move out of the shot, and it never happens. It seems like they're all caught in an eternal slow motion circle pit.

Regardless, the tower looks epic.

And I take way too many pictures of it.

Including some with my only friends (Kitten and Straight Edge Man).

We loiter for awhile at the lodge nearby, and I start to notice that my stomach is acting pretty weird. Considering this is nothing new, I'm not too worried, but before I know it I'm waddling across the parking lot towards the composting privies holding my butt cheeks closed tight.

What the hell? Where'd this come from? I go through a mental checklist of all the food I've eaten today... Powerade, more powerade, a whole sleeve of gluten free cookies, hella sugar cereal, chocolate... More cookies. Holy shit, did I eat anything that wasn't 90 percent sugar? This explains why my stomach is feeling so gnarly.

On the way down the mountain and to our shelter for the night, my stomach is hurting bad and I'm having serious problems. God damnit, not this shit again (pun in-fucking-tended).

I feel so shitty by the time we get there that I barely eat dinner, gag down a few tinctures and a clove of raw garlic, and listen to the most abhorrent thruhiker in the world tell the most god awful stories in the most god awful surfer bro accent.

His name is "So Way", he carries wiffle ball bats with him to kill rodents, and thank the fucking lord he's going southbound. 

Me and So Way immediately get off to a bad start when he begins to brag about his sadistic practice of clubbing mice, chipmunks, even squirrels to death with his wiffle ball bats. He argues that it's the mice or him, as if mice are going to kill him by getting into his food bag and give him norovirus and therefore kill him. Or you know, you could just hang your food bag, or sleep in a tent (and not the shelter). And since when did norovirus ever kill anyone?! What is this, the god damn Oregon Trail? I've never heard of norovirus killing any thruhiker.

So Way spends the next hour talking nonstop, now telling us where to get weed up north, now asking Stevie if he gave him an egg sandwich earlier in the trail, now bragging about his hiking record, now saying he's stopped two potential armed robberies with his own guns, now blahblahblah. I feel sick to my stomach and this idiot is making me feel ten times worse.

I had planned to sleep in the shelter, but I can't stand this dumbass, so I go set up my tent in the dark and fantasize about breaking his stupid fucking wiffle ball bats in half (maybe over his head) until I pass out.

Day 113, 114: Trail peeps.

113:

I'm going to make a new blog called "Pictures of Stevie Holding a Cat". You'd subscribe to that right?

So you've probably heard about a few Appalachian Trail personalities at this point, there's a lot of weirdos like me who have used the trail to enable their life of pseudo homelessness. Some of these weirdos are the enablers of said homelessness. Some of them suck, some of them are fucking great.

One such fucking great person is "The Cookie Lady" whose name I don't know but let's you tent in her yard, pick blueberries from her garden (or orchard, perhaps?), and has a seemingly unlimited supply of homemade cookies, lemonade, and soda. Cool.

Also staying at The Cookie Lady's is Warren Doyle and his crew.

How does one explain Warren Doyle? Well, he claims to have hiked the AT about 17 times, he signs all the registers with the number 36,000 to demonstrate his mileage, and he's one of the personalities who totally suck.

Take one look at Warren Doyle and this is what you see: an older man wearing a much too large cotton tshirt, glasses with one lens held in entirely by duct tape, and athletic shoes from walmart. He looks like a random dayhiker. Not exactly the kind of person you'd expect to have hiked almost 40,000 miles... But maybe this is indicative of the AT and what kind of people seek refuge here.

Anyhow, Doyle's crew (aka cult) is a group of hand selected people who slack pack (carry very little and have provisions waiting for them at every road crossing) every day. Sometimes they're going south, sometimes they're going north, but always they meet back at a van where their supplies and shelter is waiting for them. I mean no disrespect to these people, but Warren Doyle is an ass.

It seems like he's almost always hiking south and he almost always stops me to chat (aka antagonize) for a bit. Much to my frustration, he likes to impart bad advice unto me (and everyone else). Advice like, "Giardia's not bad! It's natural! Your body adapts to having it!" or how about, "You young kids spend too much money on expensive coffee, why don't you just go to McDonald's?" and other such oddities. He also claims to be Jennifer Phar Davis's "mentor", whatever that means, and has talked a fair amount of shit on Scott Jurek.

This pisses me off the most.

Not only does he associate himself with Jennifer and then talk shit, making it out to be like he's speaking on her behalf, he makes all sorts of wild accusations about Scott. Maybe it's the vegan warrior inside of me, but I cannot stand this. Scott Jurek (and all vegans) should not have to endure so much criticism and abuse for little to no reason by people who have no connection to them whatsoever. It's not up to Scott (or anyone else) to have to endure this. At the end if the day, both Scott and Jennifer are tremendous athletes and I respect them both an  incredible amount. I don't want assholes like Warren Doyle creating some false rivalry between them.

End rant.

114:

It's 4:00 in the morning and we're camped out in The Cookie Lady's yard. Thunder peels are closing in on us from the distance and as they approach, I get more and more worried about the oncoming storm. This thunder is unlike any I've ever heard, and I'm from Oklahoma, the land of totally insane thunderstorms. It shakes the ground and rumbles on for a good half minute with every flash of too bright lightning. Fuck, this is scary. Before we know it, it's on top of us, wind whipping our tents around like crazy, and I'm suddenly thinking very hard about the very large almost dead pine trees looming dangerously overhead. Stevie watches as every tent lights up with headlamp illumination, the obvious sign of hikers making sure their tent (or tarp) is working properly. I'm not any different, I'm searching around frantically, making sure that my ground cloth is protecting me and my gear from most of the rain, but it's too much water and I'm getting continual "splash". But the storm is over soon enough, and it's back to what little sleep we can get.

We get up late, letting the sun rise and bake the moisture off our tents, fill up on well water that tastes a lot like hard boiled eggs, use a broken toilet in a seemingly abandoned house and set out.

The trail is increasingly covered in fallen pine needles, much to my delight. In my opinion, pine trees are superior to all other trees, or maybe I just like the change. But pines don't feel as suffocating and provide awesome ground cover. We're obviously getting farther north.

I switch between listening to my audiobook, Robert Jordan's The Eye of the World, one if my favorites and a book that provokes feelings of warm nostalgia and familiarity in me, and talking nonsense to Stevie and Cheyanne, mostly quoting our favorite bits of The Office or some stupid Chris Farley movie.

I run into Mr. Doyle again and he pays me some offhanded compliments, first asking me if I've been institutionalized and following up by clarifying, "You seem too articulate and too much of a free thinker to have been institutionalized". I think this is his way of apologizing or at least remedying our previous discussion. Maybe I don't hate this guy.

But I still don't like him.

Soon enough we're in town again and the local hardware store has free denatured alcohol outside. Dope. The owner chats with us for a bit and I say something about needing to fix my pole so he gives me some really really strong adhesive, also free. Double dope.

Another such fucking great person is Thomas Levard, a "trail angel" in Dalton, MA who lives literally right on the trail. His yard is a makeshift shelter, his porch is a phone charging station, and his spigot is a high pressure mountain spring. He'll even drive you to Price Chopper! Next to Price Chopper is a Starbucks. Holy crap.

We had planned on hiking out of Dalton tonight, but we loiter for far too long at Starbucks and end up back in Mr. Levard's yard with about fifty other hikers. How silly, looking at so many tents packed into a small residential backyard.

Hold up hold up hold up.

Okay guys, I've been sick and my phone's been waterlogged, but I've got posts on the way, promise.

In the meantime, we're in Manchester Center, Vermont (praise jesus hallelujah) and I'm waiting to hear back from a hospital. 

Here's some pictures:

The beginning of the end of this journey has begun.

Day 112: Sometimes you just do things.

112:

The AT at this point looks like a lot of this:

And some of this:

And even some of this:

But today we stopped at a magical place, a place called Upper Goose Pond Cabin. This may very well be the highlight of the AT in Massachusetts.

Upper Goose Pond Cabin is a relatively new (20 year old) fully enclosed cabin with a propane gas powered range. It has its own caretaker (during summer months) and they (whoever they may be at the time) are extremely amazing. They get you spring water, wash your dishes, provide you with hot water for coffee and tea, and they'll even make you pancakes (obviously not vegan, so we didn't partake).

Needless to say, hikers flock to this spot to live out our wildest hedonistic fantasies and sleep in a mosquitoless bunkroom on a vinyl mattress. Luxurious, we know.

But the cabin isn't the dopest part of Upper Goose Pond, it's the pond itself. The cabin comes equipped with canoes and kayaks and you're welcome to boat or swim at your leisure. The water is so clear you can see probably ten feet down, and it's so warm that the surface is something akin to lukewarm bathwater.

There's a chessboard at the cabin that someone sharpied onto a piece of wood, so me and Cheyanne have at it. Before long we've attracted the attention of an older fellow (section hiker and thruhike alumni) who unbeknownst to me, is the Chess Master. He promptly whoops my ass and explains, "I just got lucky." Then his twenty something year old daughter challenges me to a game and I accept, embracing myself for another methodical evisceration. Through some sort of weird fluke, I win, and regain some of my injured pride, but I'm a smug asshole and tell her, "I just got lucky".

I'm the last of the fourteen thruhikers up to the bunkroom. It's 10:30, but I still can't sleep, so I read for about an hour, finally finishing my book, Eat and Run by Scott Jurek. 

There's a part where he talks about what it takes to be an ultramarathon runner, the mental fortitude, the physical prowess, the dedication to discipline, but mostly about the will to achieve something great. To push your mind and your body to complete and total exhaustion and then to just... keep going. He repeats a mantra that his dad nailed into him throughout his childhood, "sometimes you just do things", and applies it to his experiences with running.

And I realize, on the most basic level, a thruhike can be explained in similar fashion.

Sometimes you walk 2189.2 miles, sometimes you live in a tent for six months, sometimes you soak dehydrated beans in a titanium cup and squeeze ketchup packets on them to disguise how gross it is to eat the same thing every day for months at a time.

Sometimes you push yourself to your mental and physical limits and then you just keep going.

Sometimes you just do things.

Day 109, 110, 111: Celebrity status.

109:

The cafe we slept behind has soy milk... And they open at 7:00! Praise be to Jah!

To begin our day we have to get out of Falls Village, and the only way to do that is to ford the Housatonic River. This normally would sound fun and challenging but in all reality is gross and disgusting (our crossing being between a dam and a power plant) and leaves us soaked from the waist down. 

Having wet feet totally sucks, but having wet shorts is worse. Why? Chafe.

And now a word from our sponsors:

If you're like me and many other underwear foregoing hiker trash pieces of shit then you too probably suffer from Chronic Nut Chafe. This often overlooked malady effects literally dozens of dirty and disgusting thruhikers. That's why I use Body Glide. Don't let the name fool you, it does anything but "glide", in fact, it should more accurately be called Body Smear. Body Glide is the only plant based sports lubricant guaranteed to completely rub off in less than thirty minutes, leaving you wondering why you've been carrying such an ineffective product for 1500 miles. So make sure you carry enough to reapply it every hour when you notice that you're bleeding profusely from the Worst Chafe Ever. But watch out for day hikers, you don't want them to catch you in the bushes to the side of the trail putting what looks like a
miniature stick if deodorant down your pants. Body Glide... It totally doesn't work.

A few hours later I'm looking for a spigot in a cemetary in Salisbury, CT. Nothing like a little bit of corpse water to get you through the hottest part of the day. I eat a couple of snacks with my back against a gravestone and watch the locals drive by in confusion and maybe even outrage.

Off in the distance there's a thunderstorm on the way but there's no way for us to dodge it, so we set off knowing they we'll get soaked through in short order. We long ago decided that rain gear wasn't worth it when it's this hot out, so we just embrace the rain. What we didn't take into consideration was how difficult it would be to ascend/descend the highest point in Connecticut during an insane thunderstorm.

Here's an inaccurate sign:

Almost to the top of "Bear Mountain" and the rain (and consequently, chafe) is hitting me full force. It's so bad that one hand is holding my poles and the other is in my pants, keeping my crotch separated from my thigh so as to diminish friction. I know this is a weird mental image, but I don't care, I'm well beyond keeping what's left of my dignity intact.

We summit the mountain, the rain miraculously stops, the sun comes out. Like a child, Stevie plays in puddles as I climb a weird monument. It's a bunch of rocks with a pole sticking out...

The descent was the absolute worst. I mean total shit. It would be hard under any circumstances but the rain has turned the boulders into frictionless montrosities and it takes us an hour to go less than a mile. Sweet.

At some point we passed into Massachusetts and although there was never a sign, it's almost palpably more beautiful.

And why wouldn't it be? And just like that, we're that much closer to Vermont...

110:

Short hike into Great Barrington, MA. On the way we summit Mount Everett, and I contemplate defacing the sign to say "Mount Everest". Petty vandalism burns too many calories these days, so I leave it be.

The mosquitoes are horrendous. Worse than ever before. They're so thick that I'm honestly concerned that they might pick us up and fly us away to their secret mosquito lair as an offering to their mosquito queen.

We hitch into Great Barrington, and (apparent) tourist trap that it is, I still like it more than almost any other town. We eat Thai food, drink espresso, get food from a coop, and fall asleep in a (vegan gluten free) pizza coma in a free hotel room that would ordinarily be 260 dollars. 

Extreme dirtbag success.

111:

Great Barrington, MA.

This town is hard to leave. It has a plethora of vegan food, farmer's market, and last but not least, soy lattes. God damn.

Besides, we gotta do laundry anyhow.

So we leave late, but not before Cheyanne takes pictures with famous people.

Those are the Eisenberg siblings. Apparently Jesse (top) is vegan and donates money to Farm Sanctuary. Dope. He's also Lex Luthor in the new Batman/Superman movie. Double dope.

We hike out and I notice that I'm feeling a lot stronger these days. Gotta be these tinctures. Or my probiotics. Or the apple cider vinegar. Or the produce I've been packing out of every town. Or all of the above.

I eat dinner by the light of my shitty new 10 dollar headlamp on a beach by a pond. The wind is strong enough to keep most of the mosquitoes away and I hang out on the beach listening to music on my phone until way too late (10:00 PM, an hour after hiker midnight) before passing out at my stealth camp in a hemlock grove nearby.