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. 

Appalachain Trail: The White Mountains' Presidential Range

I walked and climbed all day up into the Presidential Range. I was up on Lafayette by late morning. A cloud had scudded over the mountain and had spilled its diaphanous grey contents everywhere. The swirling fog drifted down the mountain, mixing in with the stone and churning out a great, grey mass that covered the horizon. I could only see a few feet in front of me at a time, but the Trail was well-blazed and I easily found my way along the ridge. The weather up on the mountain, which wasn’t much lower than Mt. Washington, was relatively mild. The wind, when it picked up, was chilly, but not terrifically cold, even if I was up in the mountains, it was summer time. All the horror stories I’d heard about the Presidential Range, seemed exaggerated. This was the reality, the weather could turn bad, but even in the fog, after two days of rain, it wasn’t too disconcerting.

I came down from Lafayette and continued hiking through the afternoon. Late in the day, I came to another ‘hut’ which had a beautiful overlook. I stopped for a moment, but decided to continue on; there was another place to camp listed about five miles down the Trail and it was still somewhat early. I left the hut behind and began a steep climb which I hadn’t anticipated. The climb seemed to be taking me up, almost above the treeline. There was a little peak on the map, but nothing that I thought warranted anticipation. As the climb wore on, the sky began to darken. A flecking rain spattered the rocks around me and shot into my face with the force of the wind which drove it. Each drop blasted through my clothes, found a warm nest in the fibers of my shirt, socks or underwear and dissipated, wetting the fabric and clinging to my skin. I began to realize that I had miscalculated. Since I’d hiked further into the north and the summer, the days had begun to shorten. The change was imperceptible until it had grown to an hour’s difference in sundown times. I kept thinking that the sun set around nine, but it was now closer to eight, maybe even 7:45. I had planned to make it into the next campsite by 8:30 and this endless climb had already set me back probably at least half an hour; if I pressed on, I would probably end up walking in the dark, possibly through a storm. When I reached the summit, I stopped to investigate my map. There was no place to camp listed before the place I was headed to; to make things worse, a hiker, presumable staying at the hut below, passed me and asked where I was going, in a way that seemed to imply there was nothing in the direction I was hiking for a long way.

I pressed on, hoping to find a decent place to set up my tent. The rain had brought down an earlier twilight and the bank of fog washing against the foothills seemed to be rising. I told myself the first place I came to, I’d stop at. But when I came to a place a little further down the Trail, on a saddle connecting two peaks, it felt too high. I was in a pygmy forest and I thought if a storm broke out, it wouldn’t be a great place to be. The wind would probably sweep right over this saddle and blow a tree down on me or blast my tent up from the ground. At the very least, it would ruffle the tent and make it impossible to sleep and then there were the rains to consider. If it rained hard, the loose soil up here could wash away and in a depressed area, I’d probably end up with a tent full of water and mud. I decided to keep going, even as the dark swelled in the valleys below.

After about a half-hour of walking, I came to a spot where the trees thinned out and overlooked a bend in the mountain. There was a little flat area right next to the side of the Trail and I decided the clearing in the trees was an auspicious omen. I set up my tent, made dinner, hung my bag and then got into my tent, hoping it wouldn’t storm as I was still very high on the saddle.

The next morning, the birds were singing outside my tent and there was an autumnal chill in the air. I sat outside my tent, and sipped my coffee, looking out from the gap in the trees into the forests below. It was a beautiful day and I was happy the storm had passed over me the night before, given the way I’d set up my tent, it probably wouldn’t have weathered too much.

I broke camp and walked along the saddle for a while before coming over another peak and then starting a slow progression down into another gap where the Trail crossed the last road before rising into the Presidential Range.

The walk back up was striking. The Trail continually looped back out to the edge of the mountain to offer views down into the valley below. I continually stopped and looked down at the decreasing size of the road I had just crossed what felt like moments before. It was now no more than a thin ribbon, drifting through the forest.

I had decided, after the previous night, that I was going to try to swing a work-for-stay at the hut I would probably reach in the early evening. I’d heard the work-for-stay spots were limited, so I’d hoped that someone hadn’t already beat me to it, but I hadn’t seen anyone else for a while, so unless they were just ahead of me, it seemed like I had a chance.

Further down the Trail, I ran into BASA, a thru-hiker I’d talked to the night before and had seen a few times. He was also planning on trying for a work-for-stay at the upcoming hut. We walked together for the last hour or so of the hike, talking about the Trail and his former job as a fireman in San Bruno.

When we arrived, I was elated to find that there were no other thru-hikers at the hut. We were free to do a work-for-stay if we liked. Unlike most huts where thru-hikers sleep in the dining room, the Mizpah Hut had a separate library where we were able to spread out our sleeping bags, so BASA and I had an entire room to ourselves. We set our stuff up in the library and then came down and sort of milled around, uncertain what, exactly, we were required to do. There were a lot of people staying at the hut and they were all having dinner. Since we weren’t paying guests, we had to wait until after dinner to eat whatever was left. This was fine with me, but it was hard not to hang around on the periphery, like a hungry dog, waiting for someone to drop something.

Vegetarian chili had been on the menu that night, and once we were given the OK, BASA and I dug in. It was the first hot meal I’d had on the Trail that I hadn’t prepared myself and, as such, it was difficult not to make a total pig of myself. In the end, I ate around eight plate-fulls (no bowls being available) of the chili. So much, in fact, that I was suddenly uncertain of my ability to do any meaningful work. We had been hiking all day and I’d just eaten a huge dinner. Normally, on the Trail, dinner signaled that the day was over. Every time I had dinner, I was usually in my sleeping bag a few minutes after I’d cleaned up and gotten my bear-bag in a tree. Now, we were going to have to work and I already felt myself slipping into profound post-prandial fatigue.

Thankfully, our work was incredibly light and I was soon asleep, surrounded by books and the other gently snoring guests of the hut. I was glad for the opportunity. The next day I’d planned to go over Mount Washington and finish the Presidential Range. For the Trail’s second-most dramatic peak (after the one at the very end, Katahdin) I wanted to be well-rested. In the case that bad weather should strike, I wanted to be ready.

In the morning, I set out at dawn, while many of the hut’s guests were still sleeping. There was one more hut before Washington called Lake of the Clouds. After walking above the treeline, past dramatic peaks all morning, it was refreshing to stop in here and get a cup of coffee. A few guests of the hut were doing yoga and I wondered how such sedate activities could be taking place amid such a dramatic landscape. Everyone seemed relaxed and not at all bothered by the sign before the Washington summit which declared that ‘even in summer’ the weather on the mountain was very unpredictable and that people ‘had died’ for underestimating it. I passed this sign and looked up the Trail, the distance to the summit didn’t seem too high and it was difficult to imagine how the slight difference could make such a big deal. I did notice, once I started climbing, that there was no one up ahead of me on the Trail. For all the people doing yoga at Lake of the Clouds, none of them seemed to be climbing up to the summit. I wondered if they knew something I didn’t and started my climb.

The Trail was well-blazed and has enough looping switch-backs to make the climb relatively easy. Once I gained the summit, I was even further shocked to find a veritable theme park at the top. Here it was, the most reviled and daunting part of the entire Appalachian Trail and there was a parking lot and a gift shop up here, a cog railway and a museum completed the picture. Probably the most incredible thing about the summit of Mount Washington was that I actually had to wait in line to take my picture next to the elevation marker on the top. No where on the Trail had I ever had to wait in line for anything. There were never enough people around to even constitute a line, but here it was at the apex of the Trail’s most daunting section. After I got my picture and bought a few postcards, I vowed not to listen to the rumors anymore. For all I’d heard, nothing on the Trail was ever as bad as my fellow hikers made it out to be. The summit of Washington was just the latest example of a theme which had come to define a portion of my hike, the Trail was a pretty germane place for rumors and, never knowing what was ahead, it was hard not to believe some of what you heard. But when a terrifying mountain turned out to be an amusement park, it was time to stop listening to what the other hikers were saying. Clearly at this late point in the Trail, the level of exaggeration was getting ridiculous. However, I’d made this avowal to myself countless times before, and I was sure before I reached Katahdin, I’d probably be duped into believing something even more incredible about what lay ahead.

After Washington, the rest of the day’s walk seemed incredibly anticlimactic. There were some amazing views, but continually walking above the treeline, I was starting to get tired of looking out over great expanses of rock, walking on rocks and listening to the mournful sound of lone rocks rolling down the mountain, seemingly reminding me of my own solitude.

In the afternoon, the humidity increased and the sky began to blur around the horizon, distorted by wet storm clouds. I looked back to where the Trail had come over Washington and saw that a large mercury-colored storm cloud had almost perched on the summit. Around me, tendrils of this cloud were spreading like plumes of smoke from a distant fire. The rain started to fall.

I came down to the Mount Madison hut early in the afternoon. I had been planning on hiking over the last peak of the presidential range and getting back down to a lower elevation to camp, but when I saw my former work-for-stay buddy BASA at the hut, I decided to stay, the weather seemed to be getting worse and the hut was dry with plenty of free cold oatmeal; it was hard to leave.

I enjoyed my evening off, but as the rain continued to fall and more thru-hikers started showing up for work-stays, I began to feel guilty; I’d just stayed at a nice place last night, who was I to take another place. It hadn’t been raining that hard when I’d arrived, I could’ve kept going. But it was too late. The storm closed in, the wind picked up and darkness seemed to be crashing around the small hut, alone on the mountain range, the windows rattled in their casings and the rain pelted the roof. I had made my decision and now I had to stay.

I couldn’t sleep very well. So many thru-hikers had turned up the dining room looked like an emergency-relief shelter. Wet gear and packs were everywhere, as were sleeping, snoring, farting bodies. Outside the wind howled and the windows rattled so violently, I worried they’d break or fall.

In the morning, I woke early and left, feeling bad for the guests who’d paid. There weren’t supposed to be more than two thru-hikers staying, but the guy running the hut and taken pity on those who’d come through the storm and let them stay. Some of them hadn’t gotten up early enough and now as the staff tried to make the dining room ready for breakfast, thru-hikers grumbled and went hunting for their things, scattered all over the place. I was embarrassed by some of this selfish behavior and hoped that others would follow my lead after I left.

Outside, it was still raining, but it wasn’t too bad. I started up Mount Madison, from the elevation profile, it looked like this last mountain of the Presidential Range should be an easy up and over climb. Madison had a knife’s edge looking summit which plunged down back into the treeline on the other side. I climbed up into worsening weather and passed BASA who’d left a few minutes before me. The wind was howling so loud, I could barely hear what he said. The rocks were so slippery and craggy, it took all my concentration to keep from falling, especially as the wind was so strong as to hit the broadside of my pack and threaten to flip me over. I had to climb mostly on all fours.

At the summit, the weather was even worse. The screeching wind drove the freezing rain right through the wind breaker I was wearing. I was soaked and the wind was so strong and cold, my teeth started to chatter and my extremities began to feel numb. This, I realized, was the terrible and occasionally fatal weather I had been warned about. I had to keep moving or my cold discomfort would quickly turn to hypothermia. I stumbled over the rocky trail like an inert log being dragged along. The rain had brought up a thick fog and I couldn’t see more than a few feet. With no trees, it was difficult to find the blazes which had been painted on the rocks. Most of them had been set up on cairns, but some weren’t and with the way the Trail illogically weaved back and forth up here, it would be easy to get lost. I tried not to think what it would mean to suddenly find myself uncertain of where I was up here above the treeline, soaking wet and being buffeted by the storm. Worst of all, the plunge the altitude map had indicated to the treeline didn’t seem to be insight. I knew once I got back into the forest, the trees would block some of the wind and the lower elevation would calm the weather. Each time I came to a rise in the Trail, I expected to see trees, but all I kept seeing was more rock, fog and blowing rain.

The wind swept over my pack and threatened to knock me over. I dropped down to my hands to steady myself. I looked back and saw BASA struggling a few hundred feet behind me. Only his bright jacket made him visible in the storm. I struggled on, slipping on rocks, grabbing onto them and trying to keep the wind from knocking me over. I put my trekking poles away; they were useless on the loose rock.

I was disappointed each time I came to another rise in the Trail to see still more howling ridgeline ahead. I was making such terribly slow progress and the wind, blowing at a gale force now, was beginning to lower my body temperature substantially in my wet clothes. It was becoming harder to move fast. When I tried to lift my legs they seemed made of stone. Even my arms seemed immobile, fixed to the sides of my body like an inarticulate doll. I tried to open my mouth and found my jaw heavy. Everything was soaked. It was still raining and the wind was blasting me from all directions. I looked back to see where BASA was and I could no longer see him. I waited, afraid maybe he’d fallen, until I saw his jacket reemerge from the storm.

I stumbled over the Mt. Madison ridge for what felt like hours. Each time I came to a rise I’d stop and look back to make sure BASA was still behind me, sometimes I had to wait a while but each time he showed up. After multiple false descents, the fog darkened ahead, indicating that the treeline was somewhere beyond it, I stumbled forward, teeth chattering, feet and hands totally numb, crashing through the loose rocks around my feet, hardly caring if it banging my shins and toes.

I stepped down into the treeline like a man stepping into a basement, escaping from a roaring tornado. It was immediately quiet. The wind seemed to stop entirely and the rain was much lighter. I vigorously rubbed my hands down from my shoulders to my elbows, trying to regain some feeling, while stomping my feet. I stayed just inside the trees until I saw BASA’s jacket appear over the last peak. I continued on, gradually feeling the warmth return to me, but I was totally soaked. Everything squished, clung and dripped. Even the inner-most contents of my backpack seemed to have gotten wet. I hadn’t gotten too far down into the treeline when I heard a joyful shout above. BASA must’ve made it, I realized and continued down.

…

Even as I write this it’s raining, a different kind of rain than that which falls in the summer in Appalachia; the winter rains in northern California are a drizzly kind that make light tapping sounds on the roofs and disappear in a haze of wood smoke. In the forest, the Redwoods crowd the sky and keep the rain out. These gentle rains are much more conducive to taking a walk, especially under the heavy umbra of the coastal forests.

I don’t have much time to walk, though. Working 8-5 most days at the flower farm, I see the sunlight only as it waxes and wanes, walking to work in the morning and coming home in the evening. I spend the day on the grey factory floor, forklifts careening past and boxes constantly tumbling around me. Yesterday, I had one of the days in which I just couldn’t seem to find a groove. All day I struggled with every task and was continually getting things wrong. It’s during such days that I remember the simplicity of the Trail. The agenda was nearly always the same: wake up and walk until evening. There were always unknowns: the weather, which animals would be seen along the Trail, other hikers, etc. but the purpose of each day was clear—and that’s what is lacking for me today. Compared to walking the Trail, the purpose of going to work seems so hollow. I find it difficult to feel interested in doing things solely for a paycheck when I so recently lived only to sustain myself. While perhaps more brutish or selfish, living on the Trail seems much more honest. I can’t pretend to be interested in working for someone else’s interest when I’ve known what it was like to work exclusively for my self.

The rain continues to fall outside and it’s almost time to go to work.

…

I practically stumbled down the rest of the Trail once I hit the treeline after Madison. I was soaked to the bone, even the things I had wrapped in plastic bags had gotten wet. After the brutality of the summit, the forest below was incredibly calm. Some areas were flooded by the recent storm and the wet branches hung low over the Trail, but it was so safe I wanted to lie down and hug the earth. I stopped somewhere and BASA and another hiker ‘McLovin’ caught up to me. McLovin confessed to being the one to shout when he hit the treeline. After the rough morning, the three of us headed down to Pinkham notch together talking merrily the way you do when you’ve shared a protracted moment of fear with someone else.

As in the most entrances to the White Mountains, there was an information board in Pinkham Notch, which recorded temperatures and weather conditions, etc. BASA noted that the windspeed up on Madison had been 84 miles an hour. It seemed no wonder that there should still be a roaring in my ears. After our misadventure, BASA and McLovin declared they were going into town and resting up for the rest of the day. I resolved just to stop at the visitor center for a while and try to regain my strength before going up out of the gap over a range of mountains called Wildcat, which, from what I could see from the parking lot, didn’t look very fun, a huge massif with five summits that almost seemed to move slowly toward me like an advancing glacier. I ducked into the visitor’s center to banish the sight for a while.

I couldn’t have asked for a better place to rest. Inside I found a cafeteria and two other trail-bedraggled and soaked hikers, Pace and Sidewinder. I had met them both before. There was an urn of coffee and downstairs in the hiker box I found an entire package of Oreos. I ate nearly the entire thing myself while gulping down what must’ve been liters of coffee and sewing my bag where I’d torn a decent gash in it coming down the craggy mountain on my butt.

From where we sat in the cafeteria, the entire wall facing north was made of glass and in the vantage of this giant window glowered Wildcat. Every so often, one of us would look up at the bulk of rock and cloud towering above us which we were to climb, shudder and take another Oreo, content to rest for another few moments.

The weather for the rest of the day was supposed to be nice, or at least not rainy. We couldn’t deny that we would all being going up that mountain before the end of the afternoon, but from the comfort of our perch in the cafeteria, with the hot coffee flowing, it was nearly impossible to get moving, especially with the mountain right in our faces, brooding in its saturnine fog which looked heavy enough to suspend pebbles and small sticks, more like snow than fog really.

After about an hour and a half in the welcome center’s cafeteria, I finally got moving again. There was a little flat ground to traverse before running up against the bottom of the mountain like a wall. While I was still striding confidently across the flatland, I saw a sign for Trail Magic that pointed just off the Trail. I followed a hunch and proceeded after the sign. Not far from the Trail, were two very bored-looking guys from the Christian group whom I’d first met in Maryland after my first day back on the Trail after stopping in DC to see Gina. I’d seen them again in New York; they seemed to be good at appearing at crucial times. The Oreo package I’d found in the hiker box had surely come from them.

When I approached, both guys sprang to attention, eager to give succor after a presumably long and wet day of waiting around. I told them that I actually didn’t need anything. I still had plenty of food after all my stops in the ‘hut’s. I just wanted to thank them as I assumed I wouldn’t seem them again. The guys confirmed this, saying this was to be their last stop; they had to get ready for fall semester classes. They wouldn’t let me leave, however, without taking a few granola bars for the road and, walking away, munching on these, I reflected on how amazing it is that everyone seems so interested in helping thru-hikers, because their objective is known and regarded as noble. If only we could come to think of all life in this way so that every course should seem noble and help-worthy.

Wildcat was one of the steeper climbs on the Trail. I put away my trekking poles and used my arms to pull myself up the numerous rock faces that presented themselves. The view back over the Pinkham Notch was beautiful and nearly vertiginous at times as the Trail was shorn away at such precipitous angles. Looking back down, I was often a few inches from a straight drop of 100s of feet. Some dark clouds from the storm earlier in the day refused to move off, but they were gradually melting in the sunny and warm medium of the clear sky and fresh winds.

Wildcat has five peaks to summit: A,B,C,D and E, so even after I finally pulled myself up to a level area, I found that after a few yards of hiking, I was looking up at another summit. The main thing was that I’d mostly managed to dry myself in the visitor’s center and it didn’t look like it was going to rain much anymore. I was incredibly tired, but happy enough in my dryness to continue my task for the day.

After the last peak, Wildcat plunged into this long, dark and swampy path through what felt like ancient underbrush that blocked out almost all light. I had seen two people while climbing up the face of the mountain, after that I saw no one for what felt like days. The walk in the dim and muddied afternoon became a slog. The section of Trail was also scantly blazed, so I continually found myself worrying that I’d someone walked onto a side trail and had left the AT to walk down some equally interminable path but one that lead nowhere.

At the end of the day, I came out over two beautiful tarns, like two clear and shining eyes in the mountain. Descending to these pools, I passed, for the first time, two hikers headed south. “Is the hut down there?” I asked them. They told me it was. They had just left it a few minutes ago. One of my hardest days on the Trail was at an end. I went into the hut and asked for a work-for-stay; they had no other thru-hikers staying and gladly offered me a place on the floor. While I waited for dinner, I took a snack and a book down to the edge of one of the tarns and nearly crumpled on the shore. I managed to haul myself over to a comfortable-looking rock to sit and try to read, but my attention couldn’t be reclaimed from the beautiful scenery and eventually, I set the book down and just let my eyes graze on the incredible scenery.

Just as I was about to bed down, a duo came into the hut, saying they were going to try to jog between all the huts in the White Mountains starting at 3 am. The caretakers of the hut offered them a place next to me on the floor and everyone stayed up a little later than I would’ve expected for a group wanting to wake up at three. I was so tired I fell asleep as soon as the talk stopped and the lights went out.

At three, I awoke to the general shuffling and stuffing sounds of sleeping bags and pads being shoved into packs. I desperately wanted to ask these guys why, if they had 24 hours, they didn’t just start at 6 or even 9 like respectable people. Why the hell would they want to start in the dead of the early morning? Was it so they could sleep when they were done? It seemed like after 24 hours of running on mountains, you’d be able to sleep peaceably even at noon. I lie there in the dark, listening to the sliding, scraping, packing and just general obstreperousness until they finally left. I fell asleep again and dreamed of home or its closest approximation.

A few hours later, the crew got up to start making the breakfast things. I could’ve slept for hours more, but I knew the guests would start coming in soon and I didn’t want to be on the dining room floor when this happened. As I dragged myself out of my sleeping bag, I thought of the beautiful campsite I’d seen down by the tarns and cursed myself for not camping in such a beautiful spot where I would’ve been able to sleep as long as I wanted. Indeed, the morning was a long time in coming, sitting, as we were in a depression in the mountains. I was rewarded for my lack of sleep, however in the form of a sumptuous breakfast. I had to stay and do dishes for a while, but when I left the hut, I felt the exhilaration that comes after a good meal and a lengthy rest period.

As beautiful as the Trail was winding out of the White Mountains, I had a hard time really appreciating it. This was the end of New Hampshire, the next day, I would be crossing into Maine: the final state. It was hard not to want to rush a little.

The last section of the White Mountains was probably the easiest and the most rewarding. The climbs aren’t very strenuous and there are numerous great views back to the presidential range. Washington was shrouded by clouds, as if shamed into hiding the amusement park at its summit, but the rest of the peaks stood out against a blue sky. Continually, I had to stop and look back over the mountain range and remind myself that I had walked it and that which was behind it for nearly 2,000 miles. Beyond the granite peaks, I tried to imagine the Green Mountains of Vermont, Mt. Greylock in Massachusetts, Sunfish Pond, Port Clinton, Damascus, Blood Mountain and finally, way back there, the parking lot at Amicalola Falls where I’d started walking what felt like so long ago.

In the late afternoon, I came down from the mountains to a quiet campsite next to a brook a few miles from the gap that led into Gorham, NH, the last place I would stop before Maine. The campsite was empty when I arrived. The shelter was like an empty bandstand in a park on a summer afternoon: it radiated such profound emptiness it was hard to imagine it had ever been inhabited in any way.

I set up my tent, enjoying the sounds of the forest in the late afternoon, when it begins to wake up from its siesta. I changed into my spare shorts and went down to the river where the rushing water had worn the hulks of rocks into fluid sculptures. The rock, so long a part of the water, copied its channeled and whirled look. It rose from the river, scooped a little bowl of water out and twisted back underneath the surface.

I eased myself in among the rocks. For all the indoor living I had been doing the last three days, what I had been lacking was a shower. The mountain water was bracingly cold and I had to enter it slowly at first. I stood there for a while in my shorts scooping up water to the vital areas until I realized how much easier it would be to take the shorts off and get in the water. I thought I would’ve been doing this all along the Trail, but there were always so many other people around, it would’ve felt awkward, especially as none of the streams and rivers I had camped by had been sufficiently deep to cover me. This one was no different, but it was a ways down from the main camping area and the forest had been so quiet when I’d come down, it was hard not to think I was the only person around for miles.

After my bath, I came back and set up my cooking things in the shelter. While I cooked and ate, still no one came. I was surprised to notice how much I was enjoying this solitude, when back at the beginning of the Trail, in Georgia, I had once been so profoundly disappointed not to see anyone at a shelter I was headed to. Without realizing it, I had adapted to living in the woods and the attendant solitude. I hadn’t just accepted being alone, I was beginning to embrace it, to prefer it. Especially after the White Mountains, an area beautiful and unique enough to draw hikers from all over the country. Some days, I had been able to walk all day without seeing more than a few people. At first, staying at the huts had been a nice break from the routine of eating ramen and hanging bear bags, but, after preparing my bear bag and cooking my ramen in the empty shelter, I was happy things were back to normal.

Soon after I got in my tent, the people began to arrive at the shelter. I tried to keep reading, but their voices were so urgent-sounding after the quiet day, I had a hard time paying attention to the subdued tone of the words on the page and soon fell asleep.

I was only about two miles out from the gap for Gorham, NH, which was about six miles down the road. I woke early and drifted through the forest like a ghost. After all the mountains, walking on level ground seemed so easy as to require no effort at all. In the early morning, still half-asleep, exerting no effort, I felt like I was just floating along.

When I came to the road, I walked about 100 yards up to stand across from a hostel, where I’d heard the hitching was better, but early in the morning, the only traffic was a convoy of thundering log trucks which seemed to speed up when they approached me. Just as I shouldered my pack, thinking I might have to walk the six miles into town, a man stopped and offered me a ride.

Until this point, I haven’t really written much about the towns I went to. In a way, they are very much a part of the Appalachian Trail experience. Many hikers visit most of the towns along the Trail and they are very often discussed as though they were as much a part of the Trail as the trees and rocks; in fact, since the Trail passes down a few Main Streets, some of the towns actually are part of the Trail. I haven’t written much about these towns because they are man-made and as quaint and scenic as they are, no one hikes the AT to visit the towns along the way, but for me Gorham was a very important town as it changed my walk in a very drastic way.

Despite how large Gorham was, at least, relatively, I had no phone service. I kept my phone turned on, continually expecting it to start chiming with the accumulated messages of the last week once it hit a signal, but the time never came, even when I was out on a highway surrounded by car dealerships and Walmarts. I worried that maybe it had gotten wet along with everything else on Mount Madison and after walking all over town, I turned it off and put it away.

After I’d bought my food and ate the requisite feast of cookies, I was heading back to the Trail, when I passed a nice-looking cafe. I decided to stop for a coffee and to see if they’d let me use their phone. The girl at the counter was obliging and handed me a cordless phone along with my coffee cup.

I called Gina. She didn’t answer so I called my mom and talked to her for a few minutes, letting her know I was still alive. After I hung up with my mom, I called Gina again who answered right away. She sounded anxious. I asked what was wrong. “Well,” she started. “They basically offered you a job.” To me this wasn’t anxiety-inducing news, but neither was I overly excited about it—at least, not like I would’ve been before starting the Trail. “Did they say a place?” I asked, waiting to hear where we’d probably be living. “No,” Gina responded. “They only said Eastern Europe.”

I’d expected to hear something about my job back in March, before I even started the Trail, but I didn’t. All of April likewise passed with no word. I started the Trail, and for the first month or so, I was constantly expecting to hear something, but there was only silence so loud and long in duration, I began to change my hopes. I started to think about staying in the States. When I finally got an offer the beginning of July and turned it down, I assumed that was the end. Gina went to Washington state and began looking for apartments. We would stay in the US.

The Trail was nearing its end, and still nothing was decided, I had no home to return to, no job to anticipate. This news suddenly came like a life-preserver to me and Eastern Europe; there was no place in Eastern Europe I didn’t want to live. Gina, having been the one to weather all these changing job prospects while I lived cut off in the woods, was less enthusiastic. The plans had been changed again, for the fifth time since I’d started the Trail; the projected future had been drastically altered.

The conversation was dramatic, as you could expect and I knew we wouldn’t reach a consensus on the idea in a few minutes. One of the workers from the cafe had come out and was sitting near me, making me feel like I was hogging their phone. I told Gina I’d call back in a few minutes, hung up and rushed over to the library.

I tried to tell the librarian my quandary, but after trying to condense my situation into something comprehensible a few times and finding it too difficult, I gave up and just begged to use a phone or Skype or something. They had none of these things available, but she offered to try to set up Skype for me on the public computer. Only after we got Skype installed, the librarian having to lean over me multiple times to type in the administrator password, and only after making the call and seeing a confused Gina trying to talk to an empty screen did I realize the library’s dated PC had no camera or microphone. The chat option still worked and I desperately started pounding sentiments out. I felt so conflicted and terrible, I didn’t know what to do. Having to communicate in epistolary dried out the conversation into cold words in Times New Roman. I wanted to hear her voice and instead I got the suspense of the little moving pencil icon for a minute before I got an answer to any questions I proposed. It was terrible. She didn’t know what she wanted to do; I didn’t know what I wanted to do and the e-mail had requested a response on the job offer by 5 pm Friday. It was 3 pm. Before I went back into the woods, before I left this town, we had to make up our minds.

I emailed my acceptance. Thanked Gina for her patience and love and then closed the Skype window. Although there had been no sound in the conversation, after closing the window, the already silent library seemed to quiet.

I numbly thanked the librarian and walked out, unsure of what I had just done, but feeling like it had been wrong—the way that all pressured important decisions feel. Outside, it was still hot and the sun was shining. I almost wished for the rain. I bought a slushy and started back to the Trail. Already, the anxiety of my decision was starting to scratch at my nerves. Away from the computer, from any means of communication, the questions started:

--Do you really want to move back overseas?

--Does Gina want to move overseas?

--If she doesn’t, will she leave you?

--How will I do the interview?

--How will I communicate with anyone at all for the next 260 miles?

Maine was only about eight miles away, but it was a long and isolated state. There weren’t many places to stop and after checking the phone coverage map, I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to use my phone again until I finished the Trail. Even the towns in Maine were too remote to offer a viable signal. Already, I needed to talk to multiple people, but I could do nothing and wouldn’t be able to do anything until Maine and the Trail were behind me. Feeling this new pressure, I resolved to hurry.

I hiked a few miles out from Gorham to an empty campsite that night. Twilight was already falling when I arrived and, for the first time since early in the Trail, I felt the weight of my solitude. I pitched my tent and cooked to take my mind off my worries, but I wasn’t really hungry and ate my food without tasting it. I didn’t think I’d sleep, but I did: a deep dreamless sleep that lasted through until morning.