The Long Awaited Halfway Post

"I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least-and it is commonly more than that-sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all wordly engagements...When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the fornoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them-as if legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon-I think that they deserve some credit for not having all commuted suicide long ago" --Henry David Thoreau

Well. I'm halfway there.

Over halfway, actually. Here are some stats.

Steps taken-2,500,000

Miles walked-1,208.1

Miles remaining-976.1

Days in the woods-88

Days remaining-Approx 47

Times tripped, stumbled, stubbed, slipped, or fallen- 4,224 (4 times per hour, twelve hours per day...conservativly.)

Tick bites- 0

Mosquito/fly bites-infinate

Wildlife seen- two rattlesnakes, one copperhead, two moose, no eagles, a flock of turkeys, and endless deer, frogs, toads, newts, salamanders, crayfish, trout, and non-venimous snakes.

Injuries-blisters, cuts, scrapes, bruises, soft tissue pain, achy knees and feet, split heels, stomach ailments, and one headache.

Injuries avoided (thus far)-Broken bones, sprains, twists, colds, the flu, hangovers, and (for the absolute first time I can remember) zero allergy symptoms.

Days spent without walking at least five miles-4

Things gained and lost...

Well, this requires some more careful thought.

First of all, I've lost one pack cover, countless pens, one trecking pole, one spoon, and thirty five pounds. I miss the spoon the most. It was a good spoon and I carried it nearly nine hundred miles before leaving it on a rock after lunch. After that I whittled chopsticks until I was given a replacement by a section hiker fifty miles later.

I also started losing my hair more rapidly, a battle I've been fighting for five years (I'm 27!) and so as of this typing I have shorn it down to a short crop. I was getting tired of it being dirty all the time anyway. In return I've gained a few more strands of snowy white in my beard. (This is a great adventure but never assume that any day is easy out here.) But more on gains later.

When I started this hike I was sick. No physical problems, other than my weight, no, this was a spiritual sickness. Congestion of the soul, if you will.

Too many years spent in the same place and not enough travel. Too many days wasted in front of a flickering screen, both professionally and in my leisure time. Too many hours fluttered away on frivolities and trivialities. Too many friends ignored, phone calls unreturned, and way, way too much time spent feeling underpaid, overworked, and unappreciated.

Some of these things were my fault, some of them were situations I found myself in because of my decisions, and some of them were beyond my control. I'm a fool (are not we all?) but as I wrote some time ago I am not fool enough to think that simply walking from Maine to Georgia will solve my problems or make me a better person (or even a different person)

But I'll tell you what it has done. I feel scooped out, empty and clean, like somebody has poured half a gallon of metaphsical drano down my pipes. Like with every step I take the poision is leaching out of my shoes and in to the ground.

I feel like all the shit is gone.

I'm sorry to put it crudly and I don't mean to offend, but that word applies more than any of the substitutes we have for it.

Is it the woods? The relative solitude? The kindness and generousity of total strangers,the startling moments of beauty,the time spent pouring endlessly over my life just to occupy my thoughts?

Probably some combination of all. But most of all I think it's the walking itself. The trudge, the daily jaunt, the total scope of the journey itself.

I think there is a reason so many cultures sent their young men on journies to usher them into adulthood.

It's just walking. Nothing to it. You learn it at age two and unless something goes wrong you do it every day.

But here I have learned that sometimes the walk pushes all else aside, sometimes the walk is all there is. The walk is all encompassing, the walk is total, the walk is, once you get past the gear and the miles and the surface of it all, the most pure and simple thing I have ever done.

And it is shifting all my gears back into neutral.

I dunno. Maybe I feel like I have a fresh start because when I get home my life will be totally different. My stuff (what little I own could fit easily into a pick up truck) and most of my friends are in Georgia, but my family is scattered, my love is in Ohio and my work is wherever I next find it. So who knows? All these feelings I am trying to describe could very well be the product of every circumstance OTHER than the walk.

But I don't really think that's the case...do you?

Will this new found sense of purity last? I have my doubts. If my suspicions are correct and the walk is the genesis of all this, no doubt the vitriol will start to seep back in the moment I step off the trail. I guess it's up to me to take a fresh start (such a rare commodity and much to be treasured, indeed, I do with all my heart) and make the best go of it that I can.

I have high hopes. I've got a good woman behind me, a brain that works halfway decent when I get out of it's way, and some friends and family that will go to bat for me every time. Great things have been accomplished on far less.

I am both excited and absolutley terrified about my life starting a month and a half from now, because the unknown future is always that way. But by God if there is one thing this walk has taught me, it's that you never get anywhere if you don't keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Keep moving. Always, keep moving.

In the meantime, philosophy aside, there are more miles to walk, Virginia and North Carolina and Tennessee and Georgia to conquer, more mountians to climb, more weight to lose, and more shit (though not much now, no, not very much at all) to leach from my soul.

These few lines of Robert Frost are much quoted and thus diminished, but good poetry always rings true in the right moments, and never have I fully grasped their meaning like I grasp them now.

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep/ but I have promises to keep/ and miles to go before I sleep/and miles to go before I sleep."

Happy trails
PAWN

Big update coming tonight!

Big update coming tonight I promise! In the meantime, this deer got really close to me!

The South

The day before yesterday our little hiking collective walked all day in the rain, twenty four miles of cold wetness, to put us firmly over the halfway mark. Along the way we passed about ten other southbounders who were holed up in shelters staying dry.

Wimps.

The first half of this great adventure ( mile wise) is over, and I will post some interesting stats I've been compiling once I get to Harpers Ferry. Time wise, I'll only be out here for another month and a half. Thanksgiving is going to be an epic feast.

Another notable occasion yesterday as I crossed into Maryland and over the Mason-Dixon line. I am officially back in the South ya'll. Looking forward to the beauty of Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee.

Forty miles in Maryland, and then I'm in Harpers Ferry, where I get to see Rachael! Look for the giant halfway there post and a map update on the 22nd. (If I can drag myself out of the shower long enough to do any writing...things have been a little chilly lately and I'm ready for some hot steam!)

See ya then!
Happy trails!
PAWN

A Day in the Life

I can't sleep. I am regularly plauged by sleeping problems, always have been, but I am surprised to be having them out here.

Anyway, I thought as an interesting topic I would give a detailed acount of an average day on the trail.

This was my day yesterday, Sept 11th, 2012.

"Pawn".

The voice of Patches, our group early riser and elected alarm clock, cut through my tent and my sleeping quilt, which I had pulled over my head at some point to keep my head warm.

"Mmmgggg?" I inquired with customary early morning wit.

"It's four thirty."

I pulled the quilt off my face and flicked on my head lamp. I observed my breath in the cool blue light of the LED.  Not good. I checked my themometer. Forty two degrees.

"Mmmgaaaah!"

"Yeah."

Fall has officially fallen in northern Pennsylvania.

Normally I do a cold breakfast: poptarts, fig newtons, instant oatmeal with cold water, or all of the above. It saves time and fuel. But this morning I needed the warmth and moral fiber (not to mention actual fiber, ba-zing!) that only hot oatmeal can give. Cold Beer, Patches, and packed our gear while water boiled and then huddled around our hot dishware like hobos huddled around a barrel fire in a Chicago trainyard: stooped and ragged, ripe and bleary eyed, silent except for the occasional curse laden declaration of cold.

We were walking by six, beating the sun by fifteen minutes.

Pennsylvania is all ridgeline walking. Flat, which is great, but rocky and dry, which is not so great. Our campsite of the previous night was nowhere near water, and all of us had packed enough from the nearest source to see us through dinner and breakfast and nine miles of walking the next day.

Water is my new and now only obsession, ever since it got hard to find in New York. How much do I have? Do I have enough to get to the next spring or creek on my map? Will it be deep enough to drink from? Will it even exist? When did it last rain? Saturday. What day is it today?

Our water source was a spigot on the side of a bed and breakfast at a road crossing. We each chugged a few liters and then stocked up on a few more to carry with us. Always a good idea to drink as much as you can at a water source. Better to carry it inside you than on your back.

By 11:45 we had walked thirteen miles. Lunchtime. The temperature had warmed to a balmy sixty five, and we sat in the sun and fueled up.

Food, always a rich and exciting experience for me (as anyone who knows me and/or has seen me without a shirt on can attest) has now become more of a neccesity than a pleasure. Calories per ounce rules over flavor. Ease of preperation, survivability in a pack, accesability in gas stations and small country markets all overrule delectability.

I had a family sized tuna pack, half a box of fig newtons, two pop tarts with peanut butter, and an Old El Paso burrito stuffed, which is a pre cooked package of rice and beans and meat. Total calorie intake for lunch: about 900. I have now lost over thirty pounds in two months and one week.

We eat grimly and quickly, enjoying meals not because they are enjoyable but because they let us walk farther. They get us closer to Georgia, each calorie does, but nobody says that because it is too big. Better to get to camp for the night. After lunch our chosen spot is still sixteen miles away.

The middle of the day took us through the superfund zone, a fun little part of Pennsylvania where indusrial chemicals stripped every last leaf of vegetation from the mountains. We came across a timber rattle snake, fat and sleakly dangerous, sunning himself across the width of the trail.

I led the way around it, the only time that day I would lead. C.B. and Patches are both younger, stronger, and faster than me...but I am not afraid of snakes, even the ones who can do nasty things. That being said, the rattler gave me a buzz with his tail as I walked by, and my skin crawled and tightened and goosebumped. That sort of thing is hardwired in, and has nothing to do with the intellectual respect that I was giving the snake. We passed by without event.

Miles later we arrived at Eckville shelter. The time was four thirty, with nine miles to go. Eckville is a rareity: a shelter with a caretaker, solar shower, it even had outlets to charge phones! Twenty miles in, it was hard to pass up. This is where hiking really becomes a mental game. We knew we had twenty nine miles in us, even if our bodies didn't think so.

Climbing back onto the ridgline from the gap where the shelter was, I began to flag. My pace slowed, my breath came hard. The others pulled ahead. I stopped for a snack. I poured a dab of water into an instant oatmeal pack, stirred, and ate it all in four bites. My body instantly reacted, and I opened another.  Water, stir, eat, repeat. After six packets (all I had left, pop tarts for breakfast the next day) I continued on.

Eventually it got dark.

My headlamp is always handy, and I scrambled over the rocks un disturbed by the dark, just as I walk in the rain, or heat, or cold, or bugs. Somewhere in the last few weeks something in me has changed, and I don't know what. I have very little control over my conditions, my envronment. I steal toilet paper from Chinese buffet bathrooms. I smash my feet on rocks, my heels crack. I now consider powdered lemonade to be the height of human achievement.

Things happen. I walk south with the fall. This is my life.
 
I smelled the fire a mile and a half before I reached the campsite. I can smell everything now. When a day hiker passes me I smell not just cleanlyness but the individual layers of it: shampoo, body wash, deoderant, perfume, detergent, hair product. Soap is the grease in the gears of civilization.

I should point out that the one thing I don't smell is the odor of myself, my gear, and my fellow hikers. The nose is a selective organ and it revolts whenever it feels like it.

I walked in to camp and there are Patches and Cold Beer, along with a few other people I will most likely never see again. I talked to them anyway as I ate second dinner (double ramen packs, hot sauce, pop tarts-1000 calories), and then pitch my tent and went to sleep. Twenty nine miles, a new record for me, for all three of us.

Two days from now, we are going for thirty one.

Happy Trails
Pawn

Bad Hostel Art: Part Two

Today's painting brought to you by the Church of the Mountain Hostel, also, those ducks must be the size of labridor retrievers.

Pawn crossing the deleware

Seventy days

For your comparison: me on day one, tired and afraid I had hurt my knees and already ended my hike. Now me on day seventy(ish?) Feeling strong and beardy.

New York: Trail Magicians Galore

I know it has been a while since any kind of comprehensive update. I apologize! Since the shelter I'm in tonight has a power outlet(!) I'll take the opportunity to make a longish post on my phone. (The google map of my travels has to be updated from a computer so not sure when I'll get to that.)

First of all, I'm through New York, for the most part. (I'll swing back and forth along the border with New Jersey for most of tomorrow.) As of September third, I have walked for two months and covered eight hundred miles.

One thing about New York was how amazingly nice everybody was. I got more trail magic in NY than any other state so far. Several people gave me water. (New York is VERY dry and sometimes thirty miles passed without water.) Two pool cleaners at a deli gave me a slice of pizza, a new lighter, and fifteen bucks. A russian guy on a day hike gave me his lunch. His entire lunch. Apples, dark bread and sharp cheese, a hobbit meal if ever I had one. A very nice man taking a walk along a gravel road took me back to his house, for pete's sake, where his wife gave me oatmeal, pop tarts, energy bars, and homemade cookies!

The funniest thing about this amazing generosity is that every time it happened I made a comment about how nice New Yorkers were, and every single person, without fail, made some comment like "oh well not really most people in this state are jerks."

Right. Well not in this hungry semi homeless man's opinion. Thank you, people of New York, for being amazing.

All this niceness was well timed, because I was feeling pretty ragged. High miles, low water, high heat (I spoke a little too freely about the nice fall weather I guess) and a tough, roller coastery trail combined to totally wear me out.

My parents, sensing this exhaustion, very generously paid for two nights at a motel, and I spent a great day sleeping or eating pizza in the bathtub. If you've never eaten pizza in the bathtub, try it some time. You'll love it, I promise!

One of the motel employees asked me if I was hiking or if I was with the Renaissance Festival that was in town.

Apparently the looks are much the same.

The tiny bar of motel soap proved inadequate to the task of cleaning all the layers of dirt off my feet, but I don't really mind. I kind of like having the dust of seven states ground in to me. It's almost...biblical?

In recent days I found and lost Halfway, Cold Beer, Stiltz, Silver Surfer, and Nail. I bumped into Patches last night and he and I have outlined an ambitious plan to get us through Penn, over the halfway mark and well into Virginia in the next fourteen days. Our miles will be big, twenty five on average, so we should catch and pass all of the folks listed above sometime in the next week.

Now that daylight shrinks every day, the key to big miles is an early start, an early (even earlier than normal) bedtime, and very short food breaks. Our alarms are set for four thirty tomorrow. Time to really step on the gas. We both want to be done by the first week of November.

There was a huge storm last night and most of the day today. I walked in the rain with perfect peace, stomping in puddles just for the fun of it, while thunder bounced and boomed off the mountains. The wind and water knocked red and yellow leaves to the ground and scattered them along the trail. Fall is coming, and I can't wait!

One more thing and then I'm done for the night. I happened to be hiking though a state park over most of labor day weekend, which meant that I had a lot of conversations with day hikers and families about what I was doing. One hispanic family refused to believe that I was walking the whole way. They also thought I was from Europe. (The kilt? The red and wild beard? Both?)

A family of Asian tourists took pictures of me and afterwords we chatted for a bit.

"You are really walking the whole way to Georgia?" the father asked.

"The whole way!" I said, inbetween bites of my hobbit lunch. I went on to answer his questions about the trail: how long it is, how long it has taken me, when I will finish.

He shook his head and chuckled. "That is the spirit of America. That is why I love this place," he said. Then he walked off to join his family, leaving me with my lunch and my view of the New York City skyline and a whole lot of interesting thoughts.

Happy Trails
Pawn