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