Updates: Day 1 – Day 12

Day 1 Started at Bulls Bridge in CT with Claire and Anne, did very little miles with painful feet!

Day 3 Stayed at Pine Swamp Lean-to. Unwisely attempted to wash ourselves and clothes in a stream fed from a swamp. The bugs were just disgusting! There were more than 10 hikers at the lean-to but everyone slept in tents, probably because of the bugs. Julie gets a crossword puzzle from some guy who lugged today’s New York Times all the way from Kent up the mountain!

Day 4 Lawton and Linda’s house in Falls Village, CT. Our lovely trail angels picking us up just when we’re getting frustrated with the trail. More incentive to push on now!

Day 5 Today we did 12 miles in 6 hours! Being at Lawton and Linda’s house was a great rest for the spirits. Of course, the cooler misty weather helped too, but we’re afraid it might rain. Riga LT, where we’re at, apparently has the best view of the sunrise of all the New England LTs. Unfortunately, fog and clouds block everything

Day 6 A tough day. Three mountains and a rainstorm. My knees definitely feel the impact of scrabbling down the rock faces. The wind is cold. Some real treacherous ground today, cold and wet rock. Finally made it to Glen Brook LT. Julie slipped and cut her hand and knee but it’s a superficial skin wound. I realize my shoes aren’t waterproof – all that spraying with water repellent in Boston didn’t work.

Day 7 14 miles today! We’re at Tom Leonard LT. The ground wasn’t that bad, but my knees and ankles are feeling it from yesterdays horrible descents. Very glad that we’re taking tomorrow off for Harry Potter! It’s been 7 days without a rest day (even considering our low mileage compared to the thru-hikers) and though our muscles are toughening up, they’ll be glad for a break!

Day 8 We get our Harry Potter! We have lunch at a Mexican restaurent! We loll about on a cemetary lawn to read, stop at a Friendly’s for ice cream, buy lots of chard and zucchini and pepperoni at a supermarket, and hitch back to our hiker hostel. Lalala!

Day 9 More Happy Potter. Seriously Also, Lois at the retreat center/hiker hostel says we can get free lodging the first night if we leave the HP book behind. Of course, as nobody wants to carry the extra 5 pounds. Whee!

Day 10 More miles, and we’re at Tyringham, MA. We actually make it in time to catch the post office and get our maildrop from Claire! Now we have more maps, toilet paper, fuel, and food. Yay! Met up with Nicole again (trail name: Shadow) who we saw yesterday at Great Barrington. Finally, another 23-year old woman out on a section hike to see how far she gets in a month, unlike the thru-hiker ‘we must make the miles’ variety. I think we’ll be crossing paths with her pretty often. We camp at the fire pavilion in Tyringham, which had the cleanest portable toilet I’ve ever seen.

Day 11 Upper Goose Pond Cabin lives up to its mythological status and more! It’s a lakeside cabin run by volunteers at the AMC, and it costs $3 per person for a bunk with mattresses, and pancakes in the morning. We get there way early at about 2pm, and we go swimming! At least Julie does – the water is a little cold for me. But warm enough to wade in and discreetly scrub our clothes Grampy, the caretaker (and an old AT thru-hiker himself) takes Nicole (see, we meet her again!) and the canoe across the lake to fill up tons of bottles so we all have fresh water to drink. Also, the coolest compostible toilets ever – two holes. One for peeing, and one for pooping! Quite an improvement from the usual cedar wood privies at the Lean-tos. I lounge on the hammock, reading a romance novel I’ve selected from all the books on the shelf. I have another fantasy novel I’m planning to take with me (oh! the weight!) so I have to finish this one. What luxury! We also stay up fairly late with Grampy, chatting under the oil lamps with two young southbound (SOBO) guys who are very amusing. I wake up once or twice in the night and outside my bunk window I see the shadows and trees and stars.

Day 12 So SOBO guy #1 (forgot his name) tells us we should make it to Dalton, about 21 miles from Goose Pond, because ‘Rob at the Shell Station’ has a mysterious tradition of taking care of every hiker need if you make it to his secret ‘Birdcage’. He assures us it’s a flat and easy stretch of ground. We don’t want to miss the Cookie Lady, half way to Dalton – apparently she gives hikers cookies! So we tell him we’ll try to walk fast, but no promises we’ll make it to Dalton that day. So Nicole, Julie and I start walking….. and walking into boggy ground and bugs! Ugh! It must have been our worst day of bugs ever! The heat too, made our progress slow. We reached Cookie Lady at about 2pm, way early to stop, but the next LT is over 7 mi away. So….we camp there (with permission) and in exchange we have to mow the weeds from the blueberry shrubs! It was great fun! Cookie Lady lives on a working blueberry farm, and I’ve never had so much fun, mowing the lawn (I have never mowed before! Whee!) and plucking berries to eat while mowing. So today shaped up to be more about tourism and travel than hiking, which of course, I’ll never complain about.

Next up… hopefully we stay in Dalton tonight, and try for Mt Greylock over the next few days! It looks like lots of mountains after 3-4 days of slow low mileage hikes. We’ll see how it goes. We want to make it to Bennington, VT for this music/hiker festival on Aug 1, … and at about 50+ miles from here and 5 days left, it means we have to kind of hike it slow to get there in time. No complaints there

Pete Lake and Scratchy, Fred and George

Today is Day 13! We’re at a library in Dalton, MA.

Since the last post, things have looked up quite a bit. First up, we’ve gotten ourselves some trail names! It got a little awkward the first few days introducing ourselves as ‘Grace’ and ‘Julie’ when everyone else has fanciful trail names. It’s part of the mythology of the trail, maybe, to take on a new name or identity for the duration you’re hiking it. So… after running through some possibilities, Julie is called ‘Pete Lake’ because her family always went hiking around that lake, and I’m ‘Scratchy’ because if there’s one thing I keep doing, involuntarily and quite unwillingly and very unsightly, it is to scratch. All over! All the time! I wake up and scratch all the bug bites! Mosquitoes, flies, ticks, urgh! Clearly 1. they love me, and 2. I have a more allergic reaction than most people. (I thought about calling myself the Whiner, because I whined about bug bites all the time… then decided that was a pale second at most). So, we’re Pete Lake and Scratchy!

Now, Julie has brought a pair of hiking poles. It is quite the fashion – every hiker we see has some sort of paired poles, either high-tech titanium or branches fallen from trees. I don’t have any, so we spent the first few days sharing a pair. And what a difference they make! They take extra weight for you on the uphills and become pretty essential on the steep downhills. In the grand spirit of naming everything, we call them Fred and George, after the Weasley twins, who are (before Book 7!) quite indistinguishable…

Speaking of Book 7…. a few days ago we took our Harry Potter Interlude! We’d taken a slow hike to Great Barrington, MA, arriving there the morning of July 21, the day Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows came out. Initially we were thinking of delaying this diversion until a few towns down the road, but it was of utmost necessity that we avoid a particularly odious situation – some random person off-trail, some friend or family member excitedly telling us, ‘Did you hear what happened to Harry/Voldemort/Ron/Hermione (etc) OMG! I can’t believe <fill in the blank> died!‘ So, to prevent that horror, we went into town bright on Saturday morning, got our book, and proceeded to spend a lazy day reading the book aloud to each other. We stayed at the East Mountain Retreat Center which has a hiker hostel for pretty cheap, and read and read and read! And! I’m glad to say (without saying too much in case some of you haven’t read the book yet) it was AWESOME! Some of my major predictions came out right! Snape is… ok I’ll shut up now. But awesome doesn’t begin to describe just reading the book. Awesome describes being clean and showered and wearing clean non-stinky clothes, sandals instead of boots, a soft bed to sleep in, and access to tons of fruits and veges and ice cream. It still amazes me that as long as I have the means (money) I can walk into a store and buy food/clothes/whatever. It’s strange to realize I have the same amount of money in my pack in the woods or out of it, but it’s worth less than toilet paper in the woods if you can’t use it.

Anyway…. our feet are tougher, we’re carrying less food, we’re hiking more miles with less difficulty (though still whining about it), we’ve met a bunch of cool younger people instead of divorced bitter old men, we’ve been the recipient of lovely Trail Magic (drinks and food set along some parts of the trail by generous trail angels) and we’re now in Dalton at an early 345pm, looking for a mysterious Rob and his Birdcage, which two Southbounders assure us, has free showers, laundry, beds and everything.

It does take very little to be content

company and comfort

‘How do you do it? Does it get any easier?’ I ask a wiry old thru-hiker who calls himself Two Dogs.
He stares blankly at me, wiping both sweat and rain off his face, taking a moment to catch his breath, before replying, ‘It’s the AT. What did you expect? You have to be a masochist.’ and then he added, ‘You can’t even enjoy the scenery because you’re looking at your feet all the time!’

It was our second day, and those words did not help lift the spirits. Already we were struggling under the weight of our packs, blisters were forming on our feet, and it was raining. Thank goodness we had gotten to a shelter (the Stewart Hollow Brook lean-to near Cornwall Bridge in CT) just before the rain started, but really, we had only clocked a measly 8 miles that day. Two Dogs, Alpine Strider, and the rest of the thru-hikers we met at the shelter had probably done almost double of that, and some part of it descending steep rocky slopes in the rain.

The next day, Julie and I sent off Claire and Anne (who were hiking with us for the weekend) and did a respectable (by our standards) 10 miles to the next shelter. And still it was amazing to see all these hikers whizz past us, or meet hikers at the shelter with tiny packs and exploits of ‘Yeah, I was in Kent, CT yesterday. It’s about 18 miles, a bit over my usual but not too bad’. We even met a guy in town who brought a guitar!

How do all these people do it? We set off at fairly brisk paces, but by lunchtime my energy starts to flag. And there are always more mountains and more miles to go. Ideally we’d just walk at our pace, stop when it gets dark and make camp, but the little essentials like finding a source of running water nearby and a flat spot for tents clearly limits things.

My feet hurt, I tell Julie. We break out the moleskin and white tape and pad our feet a little. A little later, Let’s stop for some water and munchies, I think my blood sugar is low. And then, too often, Bugs! I hate those f**king mosquitoes! because I’m clearly the mosquito magnet. I realize our problem for our slow pace is that we keep taking breaks every hour or so, and as the day goes on, the breaks get longer and longer. But how do get faster if our energy is failing by mid-afternoon, and our feet hurt more and more?

I start to get neurotic about my pack weight. I obsessively run through every item in my head, trying to rid myself of unnecessary ounces. First my journal, spare tank top and bra, thin Japanese book, stove and pack instructions, map pages, tiny moisturizer, tiny facewash and camera (I take Claire’s instead) go home with Claire and Anne to Boston. Now I’m seriously thinking of getting rid Claire’s camera even, my cellphone (which gets absolutel no reception, even in town – stupid T-Mobile), my 3 art pencils, a couple more tiny toiletry items, and perhaps even my pants (which i’ll just replace with my rain pants, since they both get sweaty and wet anyway). And still the pack is heavy! Part of it is untouchable, like sleeping bang, hammock tent, first aid kit etc, but still my mind gnaws obsessively at this problem. It slowly dawns on us that we are carrying too much food. If we carry less and resupply once every 5 days on average we’d cut down our food supplies by almost as much as half. And luxury items like teas and spices and miscellaneous flavorings are useless if we’re dead tired when we reach camp. After all, all AT hikers want to do is just boil water to make a meal, then zzzz.

Today is Day 4. We had planned to do 12 miles, and increase of 2 over yesterday. Unfortunately the pattern repeated itself and by late afternoon we’d decided to stop for the day at Falls Village, which brought out daily total to about 8 miles. Along the way, along a mercifully flat section, I complained to Julie about the AT attitude. They all start at dawn, walk till dusk, snatch breaks along the way, eat crap, fall asleep stinking and dirty. Just so that they can do 15 miles a day? Well, I came here to space out and have fun and think and walk. I’m willing to get sweaty and tired and blistered and bitten, but only to a certain extent! What’s this about coming here to be a masochist? People don’t talk very much at all (they’re too busy panting or making camp or getting water before it gets dark) and when they do its about distance and gear. Where’s the social life?

Today, however, in the depths of contemplating our failures and good hikers, we get vindicated. First we meet a group of elementary school kids with their camp counselors. The kids demand to know how we go so fast! They’re loaded with packs (kid-sized) too, and uniformly groan when we tell them it’s 4 miles to their shelter. Clearly, standards are relative, and to them we were racing. Then we meet a hiker from Seattle, who called all the other hikers insane. He seems to want to enjoy his hike too, and is sitting on a log allowing himself to look drained and not too gung-ho. Maybe all the thru-hikers who start from Georgia have become masochists in order to survive. Maybe they actually like the notion of suffering. Maybe everyone else gets weeded out early. Maybe that’s why no one talks very much. I complain to Julie again about how different it was in Shikoku, where you come across people all the time, people from all walks of life, who talk and discourse and want to know about you and share a part of their lives with you. The AT seems to be a more solitary and purifying sort of trail. The question is, do we want to be so purified, or do we want to have fun while we hike? In any case, we’re getting lost on the road to Falls Village when Julie stops a woman on a bicycle and asks her to direct us to a cafe where we know the owners let hikers camp on their property. Linda, the woman, says, ‘Well, why don’t you guys just stay at our place instead. You can shower, and do laundry.’ All these are magic words to two people who looked very much like half-dead rats. She picks us up in her car, and brings us back to a lovely house with a huge garden (supplies all their vegetables), chicken coops (their eggs) lots and lots of books and even a Steinway piano! Oh, and in case we didn’t mind, dinner at 630, and the bathroom is there, and here are two rooms for you. We could have cried. At that point we would have been grateful for a lawn to tent on and a tap for water. Instead we get lovely dinner, beds, showers, laundry, internet, and a directive to ‘finish up all the blueberries, raspberries and the ice cream is in the fridge’. wow!

So…. in the end, (at least of now) I realize i like company and the occasional comfort. The ethic of denial and suffering isn’t mine. So while our low miles per day hasn’t changed, at least I feel quite a bit better about taking it at our pace and having time to enjoy the scenary. As Linda says, her son Ben who hiked the AT years ago said the first 500 miles are the worst.

We’ll see! At this rate it’ll be a long time before we hike that much!

Hair!

So today we cut off my hair, and it has become a community project

(apologies for sideways presentation… i couldn’t figure it out and it’s 3am!)

this is the before picture

Julie with the first cut

Claire is definitely enjoying this…

Anne gives it a go too!

all shorn but not yet bald!

yeah, photoshoot! (i’ll look like this in maybe a month)

I can taste the freedom! no more heavy tangled hair!

Bald! Adam finishes off what the girls started

profile view…

mysterious 3/4 perspective view

The Last Gasp of Vanity

It’s hitting me.

Today I realized that I have two, possibly three days, before I shave my head, forsake most of my worldly possessions and all the surface gloss of living in civilization, and plunge into the wilderness.

Few of the events of the past month (crazy packing, leaving people, bumming around in Boston, going to Montreal to get a tourist visa, tying up miscellaneous loose ends) have heralded the upcoming start of my Appalachian Trail section hike as much as much as the notion of cutting off all my hair. Of course, I have reasons for that drastic act, mostly hygiene ones – my head itches unbearably after a few days without washing. So it makes a lot of sense to just do without hair, especially in the warmth of the summer. Also, this is best time to do it if I ever want a shaved head – in the mountains, away from curious stares wondering if I’m a dyke, punk, or cancer patient.

I have my vanity. I think my head is somewhat oddly shaped, and probably not too pretty bare of all adornment. It is largish and oval from the front, but with very little curvature in profile. I have a flat back to my head. Maybe I was left lying in my cradle a lot as an infant and the whole skull just flattened out a little bit. Let’s just say I would never go around as a two-dimensional baldy in normal social circumstances. Ah vanity! After years of growing up with short bobs and bangs, I let my hair grow out in college, and have gotten used to the feel of it being shoulder-length or longer, a significant weight that can be dressed up or down, a banner floating in the wind, a veil to hide my face behind, a symbol of femininity. Enough people have told me that I look better with long hair than short hair that it has become a crutch to my ego. It also provides the occasional boost of superiority about low-maintenance natural beauty when other girls bemoan their hair products and hours of styling and brushing and all I do is wash it, and maybe quite infrequently comb it. Too many little things that prop up self and image, to be simply labeled as ‘vanity’!

But bareness is also attractive and meaningful in a different, non-aesthetic way. A change in haircut sometimes functions as a physical marker of transition, and though this is my secondary reason for taking it all off, it’s probably no less significant. Going hiking along the trail is quite similar to the Shikoku pilgrimage for me, and a pilgrimage of any sort has always been characterized by a time of preparation, of meditation, detachment, or some other paring down to reveal a pilgrim’s essence. Now clearly I have been quite frantic and attached (see the previous post on adding to my material goods) so perhaps the haircut, properly ritualized, becomes a last minute attempt at reaching spiritual calm.

I envision being centered and serene, glowing with that sort of calm that monks and nuns have…. but so far all I can see is an unattractive bald head, where the bones of my face look too broad. I wonder if I am trading certain sensuality for uncertain (and unwanted?) ’spirituality’. Perhaps the haircut is just the first step, and if I’ve learnt anything from Shikoku, it’s that good intentions aside, change happens along the path, after you get dirty, tired, rained on, bitten, and splattered in mud and come through it all smiling. Perhaps there’s no forcing anything, and what happens happens, with the hair being only an external indicator.

So we will see what happens! The hair comes off with Julie wielding the razor (I can’t think of a more appropriate person). But in the mean time, I’m going to wear dresses and skirts and take pains with my appearance and let the hair down and today Nozomi and I are going shopping to satisfy my last gasp of vanity before I go the route of Jean-Luc (he has a nice-shaped head!) Picard!

Before and after pictures will be forthcoming!