Appalachain Trail: Maine pt. 1

xxix.

I had scarcely woken when I felt the constriction of anxiety. Despite my good night’s sleep, my problems seemed to have intensified until my only thought was ‘I’ve got to hurry up and finish this Trail.’ Not only did the job suddenly seem to require so much more attention, but my own relationship of over five years seemed threatened. Gina had become exhausted with the changing futures (Turkmenistan, Washington State, California, Eastern Europe) and for the last six months, I had hardly been more than a voice on the phone. Sometime while I slept, it clicked: she was tired of me being out here; if I didn’t finish this experiment soon, my relationship might suffer for it. Although we’d been apart for a while, somehow I hadn’t considered this and the sudden realization of it terrified me. My heart suddenly started pounding away like I’d had too much coffee. I made up my mind, I had to move faster than I’d moved before. I had to finish this as soon as possible.

I hit the Trail and started tearing my way along. The Trail, almost in response, seemed to rise up against me. Around 10 am, I crossed into Maine almost in a panic. Even at the last state, I still had so far to go. I stopped for a picture. I couldn’t smile, I couldn’t even look indifferent. I put the camera away and went back to fighting the stupid Trail.

The more I bungled, the more upset I became at myself. Why had I left Gorham? Nothing had been resolved. I’d really only complicated things and then dashed back into the woods from which nothing could be solved, my problems could only fester.

That was my hardest day on the Trail. What a lot of hikers don’t realize is that as your body acclimates to life in the woods, your mind, which is quick to embrace the novel setting initially, begins to struggle. The further I walked into Maine, the more I became aware that the music and random thoughts that had accompanied me for large portions of the walk, had begun to subside, leaving only angry voices and uncomfortable silences. I would walk for hours thinking nothing at all only to suddenly have my meditation scattered by a voice yelling at me, asking me what the hell I thought I was doing being so damn selfish. The voice would enumerate the selfish acts of my life until I thought I could stand no more and then it would subside into silence again. It was almost as if the peace I had found had allowed me to see the meanness in my personality even better.

The first ten miles of Maine (going north) are some of the hardest miles on the Trail and burdened as I was with so much psychic weight, I could barely make it around such normally formidable obstacles as the Mahoosuc Notch and the sonofabitchin’ Mahoosuc Arm. I felt so awful. I kept thinking, I have no business being out here anymore. I started to think of leaving the Trail. What did it matter, I’d made it from Georgia to Maine; why did I need to walk into the middle of nowhere Maine just to reach ‘the end?’ It was all arbitrary anyway.

After scrambling up what felt like miles of sheer rock walls, still damp from the morning’s light rain, I stumbled over a relatively flat and bald area which seemed surreal after all the dense growth I’d pushed through that day. I came down into a beautiful lake basin and shelter area as twilight deepened. It was to be the last shelter area with a fee and I had hoped to find a good campsite either right before or right after it so as to avoid paying, but there was nothing. After 2,000 miles of free camping, as exhausted as I was, I could not accept the idea of paying to set my tent up. I asked the area’s caretaker if there wasn’t any kind of work-for-stay I could do. She agreed to let me plant a few trees.

While she showed me what to do, we talked. I explained my situation to her and she recommended that I leave the Trail. “It sounds like you’ve got a lot on your plate,” she told me. “You know, the Trail isn’t going anywhere; it’ll be here when you want to come back.” I explained to her that this was a difficult decision after coming all the way from Georgia, but, what she said made sense. I had always planned on only walking the Trail until I had to leave for work anyway, it was only that my job offer had come so late and instead of being in Virginia, I was practically on the Maine border—I was almost done, but the more I thought about it, she was right. It didn’t make any difference how far I’d come, I now had other, more important things to do and it was time to take responsibility.

I went to sleep in the shelter that night, it was too rocky for a tent. I was the only one sleeping there; I spread my stuff out like I was at home; It was almost dark before I finished my work and I figured no one else would be coming anyway. I went to sleep happy to have made a decision. Rangely, Maine, the next town, was about two days away. I’d walk there and figure out what to do. If I needed to, I’d get off the Trail but I’d wait until I arrived and assess things again.

The next morning, despite the previous day’s grueling hike, I woke early and started out into a deep mist before anyone else in the campground had begun stirring. I took my phone out my my bag, hoping to catch some stray reception to call Gina, but at the top of the mountain, there was nothing and I started down to a gap and parking area. Having made a decision, I was no longer in a hurry. The previous day had proved to me that it was impossible to try to rush through a 280-mile hike, especially in Maine. I walked easier and stopped to chat with the weekend hikers coming in the opposite direction. When one group stopped to talk to me, assuming I’d come from Georgia by my beard’s length and the condition of my clothes, they congratulated me. After all, they reasoned, I was nearing the finish. It felt incredibly liberating to tell them that I was probably going to end my adventure at the next town. They looked at me incredulously until I explained the situation with my job to them. They politely pretended to understand, but it was obvious they thought I was totally insane. Oddly, this made me feel even better about my decision. It seemed to free me once and for all from the mad desire to ‘finish’ the hike. Telling someone that I wasn’t going to go the end, was the first step toward doing it.

When I reached the parking lot, I was disappointed to find I still had no phone signal. I wanted to tell my mom to hold off on a package and I was dying to talk to Gina, if only for a minute. I was so desperate, I waited around until I saw a day-hiking couple getting out of their car and approaching the Trail. I asked them if I could give them a little money to use their phone for a minute. The couple happily agreed but when I tried the number I got a ‘no signal’ message. “Yeah,” the couple told me. “The signal here is usually pretty weak.” They offered to send a message for me when they got back home that evening. I thanked them profusely and wrote, telegram style: “Don’t send package. Thinking about getting off Trail. Everything fine.” I handed the paper to the couple, thanked them again and strode back off to the Trail, still unable to believe what I was doing.

I left my phone on and, continued to check for a signal. I’d reached a mountain, came down into another little gap and was on my way up to another summit when my phone gave a little vibration of receiving the messages from the last week or so since I’d had any reception. Immediately and with shaking hands, I dialed Gina’s number. After five horribly suspenseful rings, it went to her voicemail. I’d started to leave a sad, vague message when I got an incoming call from her.

“Hello?”

“Hi,” she said, not sounding exactly happy.

Immediately, I began to pour the horror of the last few days out into the phone. Uncertain of where to start, I blabbed incoherently for a while. As I blathered, I began to realize the problem. While talking to Gina had become almost a hallowed experience for me, it no longer meant anything to her. She almost seemed bored with the conversation. When I mentioned this, she affirmed it for me.

“It’s not enough for me to talk to you anymore. I need to see you.” She explained the scenario for me. Since Olympia, things had been difficult. She was in the real world, living with her parents, trying to untangle everything in our future, while I had been in the woods basically just screwing around. These e-mails about my job had come and she hadn’t even known what to do about them and there’d been no way to contact me.

As she talked, I noted distressingly, that she was using a lot of past tense. It was like things had already ended. On this mountain top, in southern Maine, I began to feel like I was going to hang up the phone and find myself single. Panic edged into my voice, I told her that I was going to get off the Trail the next day, catch the first flight out to see her, things would be better. But, no. It was no use, she said. Too much time had passed. I couldn’t rush out now and fix everything. “Besides, aren’t you almost done?” She asked. I told her I had a little over 200 miles left. “Don’t do anything rash,” she told me. “We don’t even know what’s going to happen with this job. You’ve come too far to leave the Trail now and I see nothing that you need to end the hike for.”

I stood there talking to her for at least an hour, until she admitted that she was now feeling a little better. “But I don’t want you out there forever,” she told me toward the end of our conversation. “No lollygagging around. Finish your walk and come back.”

When I hung up the phone, I felt better. We’d even talked a little about where we might end up in Eastern Europe. The talk had been, for the first time, excited. I realized that she was right. This had taken too long—although not as long as I’d expected, the emotional time had been doubled or tripled. The voice about my selfish actions started up again, but it was pacified. It was more like an adviser now, gently showing me where I’d erred. I gradually began to see how Gina’s faith in someone forever taking off after the next adventure could’ve been shaken by the increasingly length of such adventures. The whole time I’d been on the Trail, I’d been thinking about her daily, but she had no way of knowing that, my attempts to show her through letters and phone calls, were becoming redundant. I started thinking that even seeing her again might not be enough without some kind of guarantee. She’d told me that her confidence in me as her partner had been shaken. I needed to do something to get it back. I needed a way to show her that I wasn’t just messing around. That night, walking into the campsite, I realized that I’d already decided what I intended to do to restore her confidence and to curb my own selfish behavior in the future. When I got back, I was going to ask her to marry me.

That night, I found the campsite warm and inviting. Pace was there and two other thru-hikers. I would hike nearly apace with these three throughout Maine and seeing them that night, it was almost like we knew that we’d all be finishing together and the conversation was buoyed with optimism despite the approaching storm clouds. From my tent that night, I found my conscience untroubled for the first time in what felt like years. Nothing could stop me from finishing the Trail now.

xxx.

Maine became beautiful. The first day in the state was so terrible that I expected the rest of it to be equally difficult, but it only got better. Today, it’s still the state I think about the most—not only because it was the last state but because it was so complex. It had everything all the states before it did, all piled up together.

Maine is also an ideal. The entire length of the Trail, people are talking about Maine as a euphemism for finishing. They say things like ‘no rain, no pain, no Maine,’ meaning if you don’t struggle through the former you won’t attain the latter. By the time you get there, it’s a place of almost mythic proportions. Since leaving the Trail, I dream only about Maine. Every dream that has me back in the woods, is always steeped in Maine-ness. I don’t seem to dream about any other part of the Trail. Which says something about the pervasiveness of the state over the imagination.

Maine is the only state I’d really like to return to and hike some more. The rest—except maybe West Virginia, which is really just the town of Harper’s Ferry, I got a good sense of walking through them and don’t feel a need to return and see more. The AT only goes half-way through Maine and it’s still the third-longest state to transverse. I often find myself wondering what the state would be like further north to the Canadian border—maybe that’s why I find myself dreaming about it so frequently; I wonder what else was out there.

Still, even after the Mahoosuc area, the Trail was difficult, not always because it was hard climbing but because the state was so wild as to be unpredictable.

My third day into Maine and just after I resolved to finish the Trail, even if I lost the offered job as a result, I was hiking along, slightly more involved in the scenery than usual. I crossed a beautiful river sunk down between two rocky banks, plummeting down from the side of a mountain. Everything I came to, I wanted to stop and take in. Such frequent stopping caused me to snack more, but I had enough food and wasn’t too worried. I was finding it was good to have a little extra energy.

I came down into a gap where the Trail crossed a dirt road. Two women were waiting there. They told me they were waiting for a ride they weren’t sure was coming. The road looked like it never saw any use and I told them so. They seemed OK with the idea of having to walk out if their ride didn’t show up so I wished them well and continued on my way, back up into the low hills I’d been walking through most of the day.

Maine seemed to be in a different time zone; all summer long, it had been getting dark around 9, sometimes as late at 9:30, sometimes as early as 8:15, but in Maine, it started getting dark around 7 and I was continually having to adjust my expectations, planning hikes upwards of 20 miles. The miles took longer in Maine—maybe because I was stopping more—and I was always surprised by the dark, often still being two miles or so from my destination when the sun started to set.

By the time it was getting dark, I expected to come to the shelter any moment, but shelters have a way of outpacing you at the end of the day. You’ll pass a landmark, which, according to the map should be 0.5 mile before the shelter, therefore the shelter is about 15 minutes ahead, but when 15 minutes has passed and you’re still walking and there seems to be no sign of a shelter, you wonder if you’ve missed it, but no, it’s just the end of the day and that last quarter mile always takes longer.

The path to the shelter was strewn liberally with broken trees. It looked like a tornado had come through the area and as someone had told me that it was supposed to storm that night, I was a little concerned about setting my tent up in an area where giant trees seemed to topple over so easily. I resolved to sleep in the shelter if there was room.

There wasn’t, well, there was, but it would’ve been crowded. The shelter was small and there were already three sleeping bags set up in there when I arrived. There were also tents strewn all over and loud, joyful voices were continually crying out. I found a place to set up my tent which looked like it could weather a storm and started setting up when I was approached by a duo of college students. They introduced themselves as team leaders for an outing for incoming Harvard freshmen. I couldn’t tell if they were trying to apologize for their noise or if they were asking me to put my tent somewhere else (which I wasn’t going to do; there was no other place for it, anyway). I told them as long as they weren’t screaming I didn’t care what they did. The duo thanked me and went back to their charges, confusedly trying to set up their own tents.

After I got set up, I went down by the shelter to sit on a log and eat. A few other hikers had gathered there and we ate together, having a good conversation about the Trail. It seemed like it was the first conversation I’d had with other hikers in a long time. I got so involved in the talk, I forgot to hang my bear bag and had to go out in the dark and find a sufficiently stout-limbed tree. It wasn’t a great hang and I assumed that none of the college students had put their bags up (some of them were still trying to set up their tents), so the whole place probably smelled like food anyway, but old habits die hard. After the struggle with my bear bag in the dark, I got in my tent and fell asleep.

I awoke suddenly in the middle of the night to the sound of a violent storm blowing through the area. The increasing volume of the thunder seemed to indicate that the storm was only getting closer. It was pouring rain, but luckily the wind didn’t seem too bad. I put my hand out in the dark, looking for my light and was irritated to find that the tent floor, once again, was like the surface of a waterbed. The tent hadn’t started to flood yet, but underneath me, the water had begun to accumulate. I was camped on top of a large puddle, that the rain was only increasing, but I remembered how this had happened in Vermont and how eventually, in fact just as I had been about to abandon my tent, the water subsided, back into the soil. I didn’t think the area I was camped was too rocky, so I assumed the same would happen. For now, my inflatable sleeping pad was keeping me above the water anyway. I fell back asleep, not really too worried.

I woke up again around four because the water was now pouring over the top of my inflatable pad where the weight of my body pushed it below the four inches of water that was now in my tent. It was like I was trying to sleep on an inflatable raft in a pool, but one that wasn’t thick enough to actually keep me above water. Everything was getting wet. My pack was soaked, my sleeping bag had gotten pretty wet and the tent was still filling with water. There was nothing I could do, with the rain still coming down in torrents, I got up and started to pack up as best as I could in the shallow pool of my tent.

I got my sleeping bag packed and rolled into a few garbage bags and I found some relatively dry clothes to put on at the bottom of my pack. I managed to do all this sort of kneeling in four inches of water and not get too wet. I left the tent up and dragged it sloppy contents down the shelter in the dark, pouring rain. I checked my watch. It was just after four am.

Under the shelter, everyone was sleeping soundly, as you’d expect people under a solid roof to be doing after an all-night storm. I found some room under the overhanging roof, set my stuff down and found a place to sit at the edge of the platform. I was too tired to stay awake, but the position was too uncomfortable to sleep in. It was still too dark and rainy to try to start walking so I went and got my bear bag down—which was also soaked. I set up my stove and felt incredibly fortunate to have the ability to make coffee. Despite everything that had happened, sitting there, listening to the heavy rain fall through the Maine forest, sipping a hot cup of coffee, I was happy.

There was no sunrise. The clouds were so dense the sun gradually lightened them from ink to charcoal to ash. The rain began to slacken, but, throughout the day, it never stopped entirely. After two thermoses of coffee, I went over and knocked my sodden tent down. It as difficult to get around the six-inch pool of water directly underneath it. After I got it out of the ground, I stood there ridiculously shaking the thing out in the rain.

Throughout all this, I’d somehow kept the most important thing dry—my boots. There was nothing so miserable as walking with wet boots all day, except having to put them back on the next day. But dry as they were, I knew the Trail ahead would be enough to soak them. It was still raining and with so much greenery hanging over the Trail, I was sure to get wet all over again.

There was standing water everywhere. As soon as I set off down the Trail, I found myself hopping around a pool about a foot deep. I had to walk through the soaking grass to get around it and almost immediately I could feel the water coming through my boots.

I had never seen the Trail so wet, it was like walking through a stream all day. The forest was soaking and the rain continued to fall, but lightly, as if aware that the forest couldn’t hold any more water. About half a mile after the shelter area, I had to descend into a river valley and stepping down onto slippery rocks, even after all the coffee, was tiring me out. It was difficult not to rush, each step had to be considered; when you walk all day long, to take the time to concentrate on a single step seems almost counter-productive, no mater how necessary it might be.

Pace was down in the valley. Surrounded by heavy mist and a sodden, grey forest, it was nice to have someone to walk with. All day, he and I walked through the stream that was the Trail. Uphill, it had become impressive waterfalls that would have been much more pleasant to look at if we didn’t have to climb through them. In some places, it was almost impressive how much the Trail had flooded. I expected to see fish swimming around at my feet.

Late in the afternoon, Pace decided to stop at a shelter, he was trying to slow down as he had a date planned to meet his parents and was afraid of arriving at Katahdin ahead of time. The last couple hundred miles on the Trail, almost everyone was trying to slow down or speed up. Some people, like Pace would stop at every shelter and relax for a while, others were hiking all night, especially toward the end. I was happy to be able to continue to hike at my own pace. After trying to slow down before Harper’s Ferry, I didn’t want to do it again and having to speed up and walk for 16 hours was a terrible thing to do, especially through such beautiful sections of the Trail.

I continued into the late afternoon. Soon after Pace had stopped, I came to a gap where two men were making burgers as Trail Magic, they had some chips and stuff too and I stopped and talked with them for a while. Incredibly nice guys to come out so far to brighten a hiker’s day, especially on such a grey and wet day.

After a few bags of chips and peanut butter crackers, I continued down the Trail and came to the first serious river I had to ford. There had been quite a few since New Hampshire that required a lot of dexterity to get across with out getting wet, but this one, after the rains, offered no solution other than to tromp directly across the thing. It didn’t really matter, I had been soaked all day, but somehow, even when you’re already wet, it’s difficult to walk directly into water.

The end of the day’s hike was beautiful. Shortly after the river, I crossed a highway which swung out over an embankment with an incredible view of a lake so large it looked like an inland sea. Above this lake, the sun was setting. For the first time that day, some light had pierced the clouds and the cold leaden waters of the lake were embellished with fiery waves. I felt like I was looking out over a wide section of the Styx or Leathe, but it was too beautiful to be such a baleful thing. The idea of Hell as a burning place was surely not meant to be introduced to people from cold, wet climes, to whom such a thing probably sounds as comfortable as a roaring fire in a peaceful cottage when the evening is coming on. No, if anything, Hell is a cold and wet place, where no light ever pierces the roiling grey clouds.

The shelter was about 4 miles further and the walk was easy. I came into marshes and skirted other lakes that still had a glacial look about them. The shelter area was next to such a lake and I pitched my sodden tent down by the water, in hopes of catching a stray breeze during the night to try to coax some dryness from the thing. All my wet stuff, I hung in an elaborate way all over the nearby trees until my campsite looked like something from a horror movie.

I was about ten miles out from Rangely, the town where I had previously planned to get off the Trail. I would stop there for the night tomorrow, check my email and call Gina to see what the status with the job was, but for now, I had nothing to do but eat and watch the last rays of light fade from the surface of the lake. I had taken my wet boots and socks off and had my chapped feet soaking in the water, which seems like the last thing you’d want to do after having them stuffed in cold, wet boots all day, but somehow the lake water was like an emollient, rehydrating my pickled feet. Just as I was going to pull them out, I noticed a leech, about six inches long, swimming around like a desperate, blind snake, just inches from my toes. I’d never seen a leech so big, and as pretty as the lakes of Maine were, they all seemed to be full of these guys. That didn’t stop me from swimming, though, not even for a second.

xxxi.

I went into the town of Rangely to hopes of using a phone and internet, but neither of these things was really available. I had no phone service and the hostel I checked into had no electricity, much less an internet connection. The hostel was only about half a mile off the Trail, while the town itself was more than 10 miles out, but a ride into town came with a hostel stay and fortunately it wasn’t a weekend so the library was open.

I was particularly anxious to talk to Gina after everything that had happened and I was fairly sure that, by now, I’d probably been sent the email stating where I would be sent in Eastern Europe for work.

Even in the town, I still had no phone service, but the owner of the hostel was kind enough to let me use her phone. I went over to the town’s cafe, got a coffee and made myself comfortable, hoping to have a long and involved conversation—the kind I only had in town.

I called once and there was no answer, but I assumed this was because Gina didn’t recognize the number. I left a voice mail telling her it was me. Sure enough, I was trying to call back when I got an incoming call from her. It sounded like this:

“Hi!” She said when I picked up.

“Hey, I’m glad I got ahold of you.”

“Me, too, I’m so glad to talk to you,” She sounded happy and I was immediately cheered by this.

“So, how’re things going?”

“Good. Right now I’m babysitting, but listen, I hardly have any battery left on my phone.”

“Oh. Well, did you hear anything about the job? Did they say where?”

“Yeah. Albania.”

“Reallly? Albania? Wow.”

“Yea—“

And there her phone died. I’d gotten to talk to her for about ten seconds.

After calling back and having the phone go straight to voice mail, I went to return the phone I’d been lent and spent the rest of the day in the library reading everything I could about Albania. I was bummed that I didn’t get to talk to Gina, but she’d sounded good and I was overwhelmed with the possibility of moving to Albania after I finished the Trail. It was nice to feel as if I was now walking toward a job opportunity rather than an uncertain future in the States. Besides, Albania was a place I was pretty excited about living in; it would be, I reasoned, like a return to Armenia—where I’d wanted to return since I’d left six years before.

I got a ride back into town the next morning to make sure there’d been no news on the job. I expected they’d want me to start the interview process with the Embassy in Albania soon and I knew there’d be paperwork to do. I sent an email out, telling them I’d be unavailable for a few days but would check back soon.

Every place along the Appalachian Trail where someone told me it was easy to hitchhike, was usually difficult. Rangely was no exception and I stood on the side of the road watching drivers give me the curious look they give hitchhikers the world over. People feel so separate and comfortable in their cars they look out from them as if they couldn’t be seen; the looks on the faces of the people driving by resembled faces watching TV. Their faces registered their opinions, fears and concerns of seeing a hitchhiker. Maybe some of them knew I was a hiker just trying to get back to the Trail, but no one showed it by stopping. Most people were tourists themselves from out of state.

The car that finally stopped, I was surprised to see, had Michigan plates. I asked the family where they were from and told them I was from Michigan myself. They were from Troy, coming in to meet their daughter who was hiking south from Katahdin. She’d attempted the hike the previous year going north and hadn’t been able to finish. This year, she was trying from the opposite direction. I wished her well and thanked her kind family for giving me a ride the ten miles back to the Trail when they hadn’t even been going that far.

A woman who’d been staying at the hostel had gotten a ride over to the next gap to skip the immediate section of the Trail. She told me she was tired of climbing mountains and the next section looked pretty rough. Keeping this in mind and to encourage myself a little after the nice day in town, I put my new MP3 player on. After the other one died in Vermont, I’d ordered this one in New Hampshire. It was a cheap piece of junk and had only worked for about an hour. I expected to listen to one podcast and have the thing shut off, but miraculously it just kept going, as I climbed the Saddleback Mountains, my mind was constantly engaged with stories of events around the world. Even as I listened, I thought constantly about Albania and when I got to the top of the Saddleback Range, everything stopped. It was such a beautiful mountain, probably the best I’d seen. All around me, I saw other craggy mountains rising from the green forest below until they crowded the horizon. The Saddlebacks were above the treeline and the view was unobstructed. I could see to where the Trail went down into a ravine and then came back up over the next mountain. I truly felt exulted up there; other than Katahdin, it was the only mountain top I was really able to appreciate. When you’ve climbed up so many and you’ve still got a long way to go, it’s easy to throw a glance around and then continue on your way without really appreciating where you are. On the Saddleback mountains, looking around at the rest of Maine, I felt like I’d come all the way up from Georgia to be there and that every place I was going to be after would be the same way. I was no longer on my way to my goal, I was achieving it at every step.

In the evening, I came to the shelter area and found another student group getting ready to set up. I spoke with them and established myself in a campsite unbelievably close to the water source. In my food bag, I found some ingredients I’d been given by another hiker, Sidewinder, who had gotten rid of his stove; there was also some wine left from Gorham which I’d forgotten about. Combining these delicacies with the papers I’d picked up in town, I had a very good evening. I could feel the end coming and the prospect of Albania loomed beautifully on the horizon. A mountainous country itself, it seemed to be just an extension of the Trail.

…

I still haven’t been off the Trail as long as I was on it. It’s only been 2 and ½ months I’ve been back in the ‘real world,’ I was on the Trail more than four. Remnants of the experience are still with me and a part of me is still expecting to have to go back into the woods and continue the walk. At least until I realize that it’s almost December and the snow is probably waist-deep in the mountains of northern New England and the Smokies. But, knowing this is not enough and at work, committed to performing monotonous tasks, I find myself reliving the walk. Something will trigger a memory and I’ll follow it until it fades, standing there stapling together boxes and watching a fox regard me from the thicket of my mind.

…

I passed the 2,000 mile mark and briefly remembered all the other mile marks I’d seen along the Trail, the one’s the hikers had made (such as this one) and the one’s that were made of wood, like the 1,000 mile marker—just a little piece of wood nailed to a tree with the Arabic characters for a one and three zeros. Not much further on there’d been the incredibly ostentatious half-way marker, which looked more excited than I was to be half-way down the Trail and there’d been the constant reminders down the Trail of Katahdin. The first at the beginning, proclaiming it to be 2,189 miles away and then gradually, very gradually the number went down as each step ate away at it slowly, like rain washes away a mountain.

I’d been told the last significant mountain before Katahdin was the Bigelow Range, so as I climbed it, I tried to believe that it would be easy walking for the rest of Maine—deep down I knew this couldn’t be true, but it was nice to let myself believe it. I wasn’t able the carry the thought long, however, as the peaks of the mountains were just as beautiful as the Saddleback Mountains I’d crossed a few days before and gaining their summit, my mind went blank.

At the top of the first mountain—like the Saddlebacks these were twin peaks—I stopped at an aerie overlooking eastern Maine, nearly all the way to the ocean and ate lunch. As I ate, Pace caught up with me. He stopped a moment to take in the view, nodded to me and kept walking. After I finished eating, walked down and climbed up the next peak, I saw Pace in his own aerie, eating lunch and looking beatific. It was hard not to imagine that we were a pair of mountain gurus.

Talking to local hikers out for the day, I discovered that there would be a great camping spot coming up near the water. I was going to try to push to get further so that the next day, I could make the ferry to Caratunk, the boatman was only on duty until two pm, but if I got far enough, I figured I could make it. But when I came down from the mountain and found myself at the edge of a beautiful lake, sitting in the middle of a corona of green mountains, I decided to stop early. Too many times, I’d passed up great camping sites just to walk five more miles; there hadn’t been a single occasion when I hadn’t regretted doing this, so, rather than despair of my decision later, I stopped early and set my tent up at the forested edge of my own little beach.

The cloudy morning had dried out into a brilliantly sunny afternoon and after climbing up mountains all day, I was hot and tired. My clothes also hadn’t been washed since Rangely, so I pulled off my boots and socks, emptied my pockets and walked into the water with everything I had on. I swam around under the sun and the mountain peaks, continually marveling at the fact that in my sweeping view of the area, I could see no one else. The lake was huge, but there were no boats and as far as I could see, no other people at all. I had the entire place to myself.

After swimming around awhile, hoping that the action was getting some of the dirt out of my clothes, I went back to the beach, tied a clothing line and hung my wet stuff out to dry in the sun. The light breeze and the bright sun reflecting off the water’s surface dried my clothes faster than a commercial drier. I made myself a nice little spot to eat in the sand and started dinner. All evening, I expected someone else to show up; back in New Hampshire, the Trail had still been pretty crowded, but, this late in the year, most of the hikers going south had already passed this country and I was near the end of the hikers going north and, this late in the hike, there weren’t too many left anyway. For a few days, I’d been seeing the same people, which was a marked contrast to earlier in the Trail when I counted myself lucky to see someone more than once. From the log books, I knew a few people had gotten ahead of me when I stopped in DC, but, most people, I never heard from again and sometimes I wondered if they were still behind me, still doggedly walking the Trail like me.

Before I went to sleep that night, I went back out to the beach and watched the stars, the brightest I’d seen on the Trail, both in the sky and reflected in the lake. The weather was beautifully calm and a cool breeze came in over the lake and into my tent.

…

An unexpected result of living on a Trail, that is, on a path, like a road, every night, for over 100 nights, I slept in a different place. The days may have been similar, but there was always some little event that separated today from yesterday and tomorrow. The result of being in a different place each day and each night is that I have a period of my life, longer than four months from which I can remember every day. No other experience I’ve known was ever so rich in detail. In retrospect, it’s like my time in the woods was lived in a higher resolution—creating more salient memories.