Appalachian Trail: Amicalola to Neel's Gap

I passed a cork tree today and looked up in its boughs. In the branches I imagined my food bag suspended—the one I had to hang every night while on the Appalachian Trail to keep the bears out of my food. I had this vision in Davis, California after talking with a friend, telling him about the rattlesnake I almost stepped on in Connecticut. Looking into the branches of this tree, I realized that my life in the woods for a summer is already receding into distant memory. From late April to early September of 2016, I woke up every morning and walked all day. I seldom saw streets, garbage cans, people or cars. I got used to the trees and the sounds of distant woodpeckers in the morning. The roaring highways, the pop music, the elections and the mass-shootings became the property of another world. I thought after a season away from everything, I would not be so easily seduced by worldly things when I returned, but my reabsorption has been speedy. I drink too many coffees out of paper cups, travel from place to place in cars, sit in front of computers for hours on end as if I never left these things behind. The only thing that remains is the memory of another life in which my consumption did not rage unchecked. I remember that it is possible to live another way, but I would be baffled trying to find my way back to this life from behind my computer screen, coffee in hand, garbage can nearby ready to receive the excess of my gluttony. Satiated and exhausted, I look up into the branches of the cork tree and remember.

i.

April 29^th

I never had a doubt. I didn’t really even think much about my plan. I came back from Paraguay with the idea that I would walk the Appalachian Trail for a month or two while I waited to hear news about my next job. The Paraguay gig ended with the possibility for renewal in another country. Rather than find a home in the States, Gina and I decided to take another job overseas. I had expected to hear where we would be sent in April, May at the latest. In the meantime, I’d start the trail and see where it led, a suitable means of reintroducing myself to my country before leaving again.

The morning of April 29^th I watched the sun rise alongside the analogous bronzed plates of the World’s Fair’s Sun Sphere from my hotel room in Knoxville, Tennessee. I tried to eat a big breakfast, expecting to be on the trail by noon, but I found it hard to concentrate on the food. I compensated by drinking copious amounts of weak hotel coffee which made me so anxious that I found myself running back and forth to the car, hoping that by emptying the hotel room of our possessions to I could also evict my slow-moving parents. In the car, I insisted on driving to Georgia; I couldn’t stand the idea of just sitting there for four or five hours.

At the state line, my dad took over. We left the highway and started down the back roads, winding through the foothills and little towns of southern Appalachia. The last town we passed through—a little resort looking place called Elijay—I called Gina. I didn’t know when I was going to have a signal again. I tried to pour my conflicting emotions into the phone call, but found it difficult to talk freely in the enclosed space next to my parents. Gina is also famously successful at blocking my dramatics. Her dispassion was infectious and when I hung up, going into the woods for a month or two no longer seemed like a big deal, but I’d had too much cheap coffee to relax completely and when I tried to eat again at the Taco Bell, I found I was scarcely able to eat two burritos where normally I would’ve eaten ten.

The Trail’s southern terminus is Springer Mountain, Georgia, but Springer Mountain is hard to reach by car, besides, the nearest fire road requires that one walk south to the Mountain before turning around and beginning the journey north. To avoid rough roads and repeating sections of the Trail, I decided to walk the approach trail from Amicalola Falls which starts about 8 miles south of the AT.

In the parking lot, I changed into my hiking pants and put a bandanna around my neck, thinking I might need it for something. My old man insisted I have a beer with him before starting. I wasn’t much in the mood for a beer either so I gulped down the tall-boy can of PBR he handed me with little ceremony and started looking around for the Trail.

My folks took a few pictures of me at the AT sign with my pack and everything on. We said goodbye, but it wasn’t too big of a deal; I guess I may have been the only one in a position to see the next few months spreading out into eternity. For my folks, it was just a few months, a span of time which usually passes by quickly even under adverse circumstances. For me, in the woods, walking all day, I knew I would feel every moment, at least initially.

I filled my water bottles, said another goodbye and started for the Trail’s head. I was still standing in front of the sign thinking how even the longest journeys start with a single step and all that crap when a girl and her little dog approached me. “You hiking the Trail?” The girl asked.

“Yeah,” I told her. “I mean, I guess.” I corrected, not wanting to sound over-confidant about something I wasn’t sure I was even going to be able to complete. “I might have to get off and go to work.” I continued and explained my situation. The girl told me that she’d thru-hiked the trail the year before. Her trail name was Hollywood. “Best thing I’ve ever done.” She told me when I asked how it went. This made me feel a little more enthusiastic. “What did you like about it?” I asked. “Well,” she started and gestured to the trail, “let’s get started and I’ll tell you about it.”

For the next mile or so, I climbed the wooden stairs that dominate the approach trail rising up the Amicalola Falls, listening to Hollywood talk about the bears, the yellow-blazers and the magic of the Appalachian Trail. I asked her question after question and she answered each one with alacrity. As she was without a pack, she asked several times if I’d prefer to stop since we were climbing stairs and it was a warm day. I told her I was fine and she congratulated me on already seeming to be conditioned for the trail.

After about 45 minutes, Hollywood’s dog refused to walk any further. She tugged a little on his leash, but he was done. She scooped him up, said goodbye and turned back to the trail entrance. I was alone. For the first hour or so, I kept thinking about how I was really doing it, how I was walking down the Appalachian Trail. Then my thoughts started to flit all over the place. I ceased really thinking about one thing but sort of tuned into to a mental radio station playing portions of songs, memories and all kinds of vague ontological effluvia. Although sometimes I would break free with a clear thought or two, I stayed tuned into this station for most of the four months I was in the woods.

After I’d been walking about three hours, I came upon a man sitting in the middle of the trail. He had an exhausted look on his face, so I asked him if everything was ok. “Yeah,” he told me, fanning himself a little with his floppy hat, “I’ve just got a little sunstroke.” It wasn’t a hot day, but it wasn’t a day for a fleece either, especially not if you’re climbing up and down hills with a pack as huge as this guy’s was. I didn’t bother to tell him that it might be prudent to take off his sweater if he was so hot. It seemed so obvious, I couldn’t bring myself to say it. I wished him luck and continued on.

About half a mile after the sweaty guy in the fleece, I found another early casualty of the trail, a three-pound pepperoni sausage, still in it’s wrapper, lying like a meaty turd in the middle of the trail. It looked like it’d fallen off someone’s pack, but I knew it’d been abandoned. From the way it was sitting there, it was obvious that the sausage had proved too much for someone and had been tossed or just dropped. As I crested the hill, I came upon a couple walking south and told them, if they were hungry, there was a sausage that looked like it was still good on the trail. “I know,” the guy told me. “We picked that thing up and carried it for a while when we came out here, but in the end, we decided it wasn’t worth it and dropped it back on the Trail.” As they walked away, I wondered how long this sausage had been making its way up and down the Trail. It may have been there for months, picked up by the odd curious hiker only to be dropped later somewhere else. That sausage may have come all the way from Maine for all I knew.

The sun was beginning to set through the trees and cast long shadows when I came up a rise on the Trail to a slight clearing. Another hiker was sitting down on a rock, eating and watching the setting sun through the trees. It looked like a good place for a break, so I decided to stop. I dropped my bag, said ‘hi’ and asked the kid if he knew where the approach trail ended and where the AT officially started. I had planned to camp two miles after the start of the Trail. “This is it,” the kid told me, pointing to a plaque stuck to the side of the rock. “This is Springer Mountain; the start of the AT.” The view between the trees suddenly seemed much more profound when I considered the fact that it was the end of a trail that stretched more than 2,000 miles. A trail that after walking all day, I had only just reached the beginning of. I ate the first of 100s of Cliff Bars before staring north down the trail, toward Maine, wondering what would be down there for me.

The kid’s voice broke me from my reverie. “What’s your name?” He asked. My pause must have been significant because he corrected himself. “What’s your trail name?”

“Uh, Mossman,” I said, feeling slightly awkward introducing myself as a toy I’d played with as a kid. “What’s yours?”

“Tortoise,” he told me. “You headed to that next shelter for the night?”

I told him I was and after he and I spoke with the other hikers who’d come up, we set off together to the shelter. After hiking alone all afternoon, it was nice to have someone to talk to through the lonely mix of twilight and the new place, after all, I wasn’t just visiting the Trail, in a way, I’d moved out to it and the first night in a new place is always kind of lonely. Tortoise and I talked through the hour-long hike to the shelter. We set our tents up next to each other and sat around a fire, talking about the trail to come, before turning in.

In my tent, I couldn’t get to sleep. The excitement of the morning still seemed to be with me and although I felt comfortable out in the woods, I still felt uncertain about what the experience would bring or even why I was doing it. I eventually drifted off listening to the unfamiliar night sounds of the Georgia woods.

ii.

I woke up in the morning to the bustle of Tortoise taking down his tent. It was warm enough with the sun coming through my tent to entice me outside into the cool morning air. I started making coffee right away. Tortoise expressed admiration that I’d bothered to bring anything to make coffee. “I hate instant,” I told him. “I’ll never drink that crap if I don’t have to.”

While I was still enjoying my coffee, Tortoise took off. He told me he’d hiked part of the trail before and that we’d probably see each other again. “I stop a lot,” he said. “So you’ll catch up to me.”

I sat and enjoyed my coffee for a while, listening to the forest and trying to understand the trail and length of time that stretched out before me. I gave up and listened to the birds before finishing my coffee, knocking down my tent and starting out for the first full day.

I came back into the walking with no problem. After a night of intermittent tent sleep, I found the return to walking agreeable. It stretched my muscles and gave me something to do with the caffeine-induced energy.

In the afternoon, the sky darkened a little. The accompanying threat of rain didn’t bother me. I felt apart from the scenery around me, so entangled I had become in my own thoughts. At this point, I had begun projecting myself into a future: A job overseas—maybe in Ethiopia, Gina would be there and we’d have a dog. The bright green foliage blurred into an arid landscape and Amharic characters seemed to twist themselves out of the branches.

Later, the wind picked up, making the approaching storm impossible to ignore. I was coming upon a shelter. I stopped at a river which was silvery with the approaching storm’s light. I drank some water and rested a while, not knowing that I was right across from the shelter where I’d been planning to stay for the night. When I climbed over the next rise in the trail and saw the outline of the shelter through the trees, I felt conflicted. It was only just after 4. It felt too early to already stop for the day. I didn’t feel tired and there seemed to already be a crowd hanging around the area. I didn’t feel like hanging around with a bunch of people all afternoon, so I continued on. The next sheltered area was ten miles up the trail, but I’d been seeing little spots to pitch a tent all up and down the trail and I was confident that I’d see another before too long.

As I walked further down the trail, away from the happy shouts of the hikers who’d stayed on at shelter, I began to feel anxious. I was walking further into the woods, away from shelter, away from the friendly society of others with the storm clouds piling up above me. But I didn’t feel as though I could stop. I wanted to walk until just before dark. It felt like a job I had to finish.

I walked on, unsure of whether or not to turn back, until the sky cleared its throat and brought up a clot of thunder. The rain came down all at once, as if from a bucket overturned. I raced down the trail, unsure of where I was going, only at that moment realizing I had no way to get out of the rain.

Everything I had thought waterproof turned out to be merely water-resistant. Within seconds, my socks were wet, the jacket I had pulled on was damp. My pack did nothing to keep the water out and my books and odd papers were turned into pulp.

Through the grey sheets of rain, I spotted an open area, big enough for my tent and darted over to it. I tossed my pack down and jerked out my tent, which was already damp. As I was setting the thing up, the rain slackened and I almost had second thoughts, but after the rain, the sky was darker; it looked closer to night and I figured, especially as I was all wet, it was time to stop for the day.

The night before, I’d slept with my food in my tent, but, in bear country, I knew this wasn’t a good idea. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was resolved to hang my food. After I got my sodden tent up and tossed my pack inside. I made a quick meal, using the rest of my water to cook and clean and started looking for a suitable tree from which to hang my food.

All the boughs looked too high or too skinny to support my food bag. I tied my water bottle to the end of my paracord and commenced tossing the thing up into the leafy wet sky, continually sending down showers of rain that had been frozen in their progress to the earth by the broad maple and oak leaves. When I finally managed to get my paracord over a branch, it looked a little too skinny, but I was too tired to try to take it down. I tied my food bag to one end and commenced dragging the thing up the tree. As I pulled, the entire trunk of the tree leaned toward me. Rather than pulling my bag up to the top of the tree, I seemed to be bringing the top of the tree down to me. Soaking wet, with a bag of food at my feet, damp tent for my abode and with a tree bent all the way to the ground, looking like something I’d roped in a rodeo, I began to feel like I had no business out in the woods and I despaired of ever getting to North Carolina, much less Maine.

By the time I’d finally gotten my food in a tree, the rain had almost completely stopped. After a few months in the Appalachian Woods, I would’ve known that the first rainfall had only been a prelude to the real storm, but it was only my second day and I assumed that the rain had stopped for the night. I also would’ve known that camping in a random spot such as I’d found, guaranteed that there would be no water source nearby. After my camp was secured, more or less, I walked back down the trail to the shelter, where I remember seeing the last stream.

Reentering the shelter area, I found Tortoise filling up his water bottles. He said he’d stopped for dinner, but that he planned on continuing on as the rain had stopped. We chatted for a minute and I felt better just talking to someone. The human contact, after spending the day in my head, was refreshing and I walked back to my spot in the woods feeling revived.

As it was still a few hours before nightfall, I decided to try to start a fire back at my campsite. Everything was wet, but I rolled over a few logs and found enough dry leaves and twigs to get something going. I had amassed a little pile when the rain started to fall again, without the violence of the first time, but with more tenacity. It was clear that this time, the rain was here to stay. I was about to duck into my tent when I spotted Tortoise struggling up the trail.

“Hey, Tortoise,” I called out over the rain. “You can set up here if you want.” I gestured to a flat spot not far from my own tent. Tortoise stopped. I could tell that, like me, he didn’t like to stop this early in the day, but by now the rain had increased and the twilight was blurred. The whole sodden forest looked almost impossible to navigate.

Tortoise resigned himself to set up his tent and, for the second night in a row, we camped together. The rain, which fell through the night, kept us from being social. Each of us, in our tents, fought against watery onslaught. By the time I fell asleep, I had given up trying to towel the rising water on the floor of my tent. It was all I could do to keep my sleeping bag from getting wet.

iii.

The morning was clear and the rain had brought the temperature down. Tortoise had woken up just before dawn and taken off. I was surprised to find that my food bag was still in the tree. I had fully expected a clever bear to have pulled it down in the night and surfeited on its contents. But there were no gnawed Cliff Bar wrappers in evidence and although the bag was soaking wet, it was intact.

Owing to the extra weight brought on by the water, my pack seemed twice as heavy. I staggered a little under the burden, but in no time I hit my stride again and as soon as I began walking, my mind began throwing off disconnected thoughts. Some I mused on, others I let pass, paying them no more attention than I did the stones and leaves that passed under my feet.

In the afternoon, I caught up to Tortoise at the base of Blood Mountain. We climbed to the top of the grey giant together. After three days of bright green forest, the ashen stones and lack of trees at the summit came as a surprise. The mountain was also skirted by a mantle of fog which covered the forest beyond it. Everything had become grey. I climbed out on a precipice to take in the first real mountain view of the trail, little knowing how many more I would see like it over the course of the summer.

The fog was beautiful. It spread evenly from the base of the mountain and leveled all the hills and valleys until the forest below resembled a nacreous sea, at once grey and sparkling.

Neel’s Gap came as a surprise. The first real road crossing since I’d entered the woods, offered up the bounties of civilization in the form of an outfitting store. After nearly 72 hours in the woods, I found myself standing indoors, browsing bags of chips and candy bars. I bought a Cherry Coke, a bag of chips and a few postcards to send home. Everything was still kind of wet and, as I wrote, the ink of the postcards began to run and smear. I tried not to smudge the addressees so that the salutations, as blurred as they might be, would still reach their destinations.

The rain had begun to fall again and Tortoise and I found refuge next to a sheltered woodpile. There was a logbook for thru-hikers next to the woodpile and we each signed it. It was May 1^st. I wrote ‘Happy Mayday’ and tried to remember how to write it in Russian, but had to resign myself to writing dobre dien because it was all I could think of.

When the rain let up, we walked up a rise in the trail, out of the gap and seemed to walk into the clouds. The scenery, dripping, grey and gauzy began to resemble nothing so much as the Pacific Northwest. Under this realization, I began to feel slightly homesick, not in an anxious way, but in a way that felt satisfying. It was good to be out in the woods, but still feel like I had a place to be in the world when I should come off the trail.

The camping area looked haunted. A few brightly colored tents rose up through the fog and their tenants drifted around like ghosts. I set up, having learned from the previous night to stop before it got too late and at a place where there was a reliable water source.

Tortoise decided to keep walking. “You’ll catch up to me again tomorrow,” he told me before being swallowed up by the fog. I felt tired and soon after I ate and got my bag into a tree, I crawled into my tent and fell asleep, swaddled by the seaweed fog of the Pacific Northwest.