(Editors Note: The following are excerpts from a VERY long letter I wrote in 1982. I had come to Maine for the first time that year and spent the Summer working at a restaurant in Bar Harbor. In the Fall, before heading South to look for another job in warmer climes, I decided to tour some of the hiking trails in the Northeast - including some sections of the AT. These excerpts include my descriptions of Mount Katahdin, the Mahoosuc Notch, Thru-hikers, and the AT in general. I don't know about you, but I find it fascinating to compare my recent experiences on the Trail to the comments I made 18 years ago. I had long ago forgotten about the existence of this letter. My thanks to Don Myers, who held onto it lo these many years and showed it to me when I visited him after the completion of my thru-hike. )
... Yes indeed, the automatic erase feature of my memory is still functioning with ruthless efficiency ("I wonder where Ruth is?"). I seem to recall eating a lobster, and then being in some trees for awhile...
... There's nothing like the lure of some sweet, juicy blueberries to keep you going on a hot day. Of course, there's also a temptation to just plop down where you are and pick and chomp in concentric circles. The trick is to keep your eyes pointed forward so you only see the berries that lie ahead. In my own humble opinion the best berries grow on top, anyways. There are these cracks and gaps in the granite up there. God knows how many thousands of years it takes for enough rock dust and organic matter to accumulate in there to allow a plant to survive. The blueberry plants sometimes only grow 2 or 3 inches high with just a few tiny leaves. But they gather what sustenance they can and almost kill themselves pumping out a few bits of blue heaven. The berries get baked by the sun and are so sweet they taste like they're ready to ferment.
... A couple of rides from Bangor brought me to the first stop on my tour, Baxter State Park, home of Mount Katahdin. The local Indians considered Katahdin as sacred, and of course, they were right. At 5,268 feet it stands head and shoulders above anything for hundreds of miles around. This, and a few other of the highest peaks in the East, have what they call "alpine zones" at the top. These are areas where the temperatures are consistantly cold enough and the winds fierce enough to duplicate the conditions of the arctic tundra. When the glaciers receded last time these peaks became little islands where plants survive that usually only grow way up in the Canadian boonies. These plants seemed kind of dull looking to me because the wind never lets them grow more than an inch or two above the ground. But I understand the slopes of Mt. Washington bloom like a garden in early Spring. The trouble is these plants are delicate - one footstep will kill them. And there are always assholes who can't stay on the trails or who feel they have to pitch a tent on top of the mountain, rather than camping below treeline. Fortunately, these people often have their tents blown down or freeze to death, so things kind of even out. I've always found the alpine zones to be barren and alien places. It's as though an animal of my size doesn't belong up there. The psychological and aesthetic urges that a mountain viewpoint fulfills seem pretty irrelevant in the natural scheme of things. Mountains are places of great power. Tremendous forces gather and find their focus there. In the midst of such power you must try to grab it and make it your own. But only a fool believes he can catch the wind by cupping his hands.
... I ended up climbing Katahdin twice while I was there. The first time I went up I don't know what the temperature was, but the wind-chill factor was incredible. I was wearing a heavy flannel shirt, a thick wool sweater, down vest, light jacket, wool cap and mittens - and I could only keep comforably warm as long as I was sheltered or moving. I took one of the easier paths up the mountain ("There are NO easy ways to climb Katahdin" - official Park leaflet) and when I rounded the top onto the high plateau it was like stepping through a door into a hurricane. It was literally a problem to keep from getting knocked off my feet. I then made the rather gruelling climb up to Baxter Peak and "dug the scene". Katahdin has 2 major peaks, Baxter and Pamola (the Indian name for the spirit of the mountain), and between them lies a thin, crescent shaped, sliver of a ridge called "the Knife Edge". There's a trail along it marked in white paint blazes, which I found to be kind of a joke - I mean, as though you had any options about where you were going to go. The inner curve of the crescent slopes down for about 2000 feet with the same curvature as the inside of a coffee cup. The outside wall falls down and away at about the same angle as the branches of a fir tree. In some places the path that runs along between these two extremes is only about 2 feet wide. I had to crouch down almost on all fours for much of the way because the wind knocked me off balance too much if I tried to stand up. I learned to brace myself and lean about 15 degrees every time I stepped into an open gap where the wind got channeled into a point. At first it was slow going, but by the end I was laughing and screaming. I reached a particularly huge gap, called "the Notch", just before Pamola peak. My rational mind kicked in for a moment and observed, "My goodness, shouldn't the Park place some kind of warnings or restrictions on this trail? A lot of the fat boys and old ladies that manage to climb this far would definitely crap out trying to handle this stretch." Then I scampered down, up, and out like the monkey I am. The difference between being brave and being a fool is often success, and success depends mostly on your state of mind.
... That was the first time I went up Katahdin. Three days later I came around from the North side and climbed up again, this time carrying my full pack. I was wearing a t-shirt. The temperature was in the mid-70's and there was only a mild breeze in the air. I would have laid out a towel and caught some rays except that I had a long way to go that day. Even so, I decided to drop my pack at the junction for the cutoff that would lead me out of the Park, and take one more run up to Baxter Peak. It should be fairly obvious that there's no way to convey in words what the view is like from 5 thousand feet up. (Once, on another peak, I asked a Ranger if that band of brown haze all around the horizon was just water vapor, or pollution. She looked up at me, smiled, and said, "What do you think?". On the one hand, there had been a few volcanic eruptions at that time, spewing up dust and ash into the stratosphere. On the other hand, I was more or less directly East from the prevailing winds blowing across such cities as Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, etc.. "What do you think?") Off in the distance the mountains in their majesty really do look purple, for whatever reason. Nearer at hand, the ponds, lakes, and rivers are shards of a broken mirror, reflecting the face of the sun. Down below, the courses of streams can be traced by the changing color of the softwoods that line their banks. On the slopes of nearby peaks the green of spruce and fir is laced with gold - the cooler clime of the highlands offering Fall a foothold in the land. Looking straight down past the toes of your boots, you see the raw edge of this great heap of rock you stand upon. The land only seems to move a few feet forward for every hundred or so down. I must admit I've never stood at the edge of a great height without having the thought of jumping off enter my mind. But the mental image is always one of endless flight, and never that of splattering bloody and senseless on the ground below. And even if in this life I'll never take that leap to fly, I'll always crave the chill and seek the thrill of standing at that edge.
... "The Man with the Golden Thumb". I had probably my best day of hitching ever going from Baxter to hook up with the Appalachian Trail (AT) just East of the New Hampshire border. Ten different rides and never a long wait. I'd figured it would take me 2 days at least, but I was halfway up Old Speck by nightfall. My second-to-last ride turned out to be a couple that had left Baxter the same morning I had, and I'd beaten them to the spot where they picked me up! Personally I'd prefer a helicopter pickup service from trailhead to trailhead, but sometimes hitching's not so bad.
The next day I climbed the rest of the way up Old Speck. It rained most of the way and the top of the mountain was in a cloud. When you're intending to spend a couple of months mostly outdoors you have to expect to get caught occasionally in some inclement weather. It was still early in the day, but I decided to stop and set myself up in the Speck Pond lean-to and use the remainder of the day to rest, read, relax, and practice rolling my "R"s. It was about then that the Outward Bound group showed up. You remember that episode of the Flintstones where they go camping and wake up in the middle of a Boy Scout Jamboree? Well, that's sort of what it was like. Anyways, I wasn't about to leave because my knees felt a little funny from the pounding I'd given them the evening before. Besides, I felt very much at peace and in control, charged up and at ease, a kind of homeostasis of body and mind. They looked at me as something of an oddity, almost spectrally strange. They were awed at the fact I was happy and content by myself, while they were clinging to each other for support. What amazed them more is that I was comfortable and dry, while they were wet and miserable. Everything they had with them was soaked. Fortunately most of their clothing was wool or they'd have been in serious trouble. The trick I'd learned out West is to wear just a t-shirt and shorts no matter how cold it is. You get wet and you freeze for the first few minutes, but it sure gets you moving fast first thing in the morning. Eventually you can establish a pace where you keep comfortably warm, and at the end of the day when you set up camp you just strip and put on your dry clothes. Some of these kids had worn raingear only to discover that they just overheated and soaked their clothes with sweat. So I talked to them and they told me about themselves and Outward Bound. Mostly they were longing for civilized comforts and complaining about having gotten themselves trapped in this horrible program. As best as I can tell, the philosophy of Outward Bound is to take a group of young people and expose them to so much pain, hardship, suffering, and adversity that they're forced to pull together as a group and to learn about themselves and the way they function with other people. Now this is certainly a noble goal in and of itself, it just seems to me it'd be better to stick them in some urban wasteland rather than out in the woods. The whole program seems to set up Nature as an adversary, something hostile and treacherous that you have to pit yourself against. Whether they're hiking, climbing, or canoeing, they're tied to a time-schedule that pushes their out-of-shape bodies to the limits of endurance. They're so busy struggling, they can only see the wilds around them as a backdrop for some kind of battle they're engaged in. They may come out of it as better people, but I wonder how they end up feeling about the woods. (The Earth is my Mother. The Earth is my lover. She'll slap me upside the head if I'm thoughtless or stupid. But as long as I treat her with love and respect, she nurtures me, completes me.)
... The section of trail that lay ahead is known as the Mahoosuc Notch. According to the guidebook many AT hikers consider it the toughest stretch of the whole 2000 miles of trail. It involves a very steep drop of 15 hundred feet, a half-mile traverse through the Notch itself, and an equally steep climb back up the other side. Surprisingly, the most difficult part is passing through the relatively "level ground" of the Notch. The entire gap between the two sheer walls of mountain is filled with immense boulders, ranging in size from that of a Chevy van to a rather hefty Winnebago. The trail winds up, over, around, and occasionally under these huge blocks of stone. The surface of these rocks is fairly smooth and quite slick when wet (it was still raining), even when its not covered with patches of slippery moss and lichen. But first I had to worry about getting down to there. This may not make much sense to you, but most hikers look forward to climbing uphill and view going downhill with a bit of foreboding. Climbing just involves effort and sweat, while descending is basically a precariously controlled fall. It's much harder to keep your balance and footing when your foot has to reach out and plunge down through space to find its next support point. Especially when you're carrying a heavy pack on your back. Another factor is that each step down results in a tremendous jolt to your body's joints and skeletal system. On a steep downgrade the repeated shocks can be just as tiring as the strain on your muscles involved in climbing.
... While I was resting up in Gorham, New Hampshire, I got a chance to meet and talk to some more AT hikers. And while I know what a fallacy it is to lump people into groups and then make generalizations about them, I would have to say that on the whole, AT hikers, and hikers in general, are some of the nicest people I've ever met. I don't know if people of a certain disposition are attracted to the woods, or if being in the woods tends to foster a certain disposition in people. I suspect it is a little of both. However, I try to cherish exceptions in all things, and occasionally I did meet some real assholes on the Trail. But these weren't people who were hiking the whole AT. They were usually people who had little or no experience outdoors, who were out on a lark, "roughing it", and who didn't give a shit about how much they destroyed a place because they weren't coming back. I think a lot of them didn't really like anything at all about the woods, found it hostile and scary, and felt they had to subdue it rather than enjoy it. The old line is, "If you're trying to get away from it all, why did you bring it all with you?" And I think that refers to what you carry with you in your mind, not just on your back.
Getting back to the AT, you're dealing with a unique trail and a remarkable set of people who hike it. (So what the hell are my remarks, huh?) I guess I was a little turned off at first by the AT because it seemed like the goal of completing it might lead me into some kind of ego/status trip. And while it goes through many of the choicest spots in the East, of necessity it has its share of long, ugly, boring stretches that I'd just as soon skip. I figured that committing yourself to hiking the whole thing would tend to make you focus on covering a set number of miles each day, pushing yourself past the point where its enjoyable, blinding yourself to the beauty of the country you're in, setting your sight on a point up ahead, while you're lost to the here and now. There was one guy on the Trail that summer who was trying to set a record for the shortest completion time by using a daypack, headlamp, and support van. Most people I talked to made jokes about him, and one guy even had met him. "You mean he actually stops and TALKS to people?" "Yeah, but he keeps looking at his watch and after 5 minutes he stops in mid-sentence and says, 'Sorry, time's up - I gotta go'." But most people I met aren't like that.
... There's a fantastic sense of comaraderie among the hikers on the AT. People leave notebooks at many of the trail shelters and they're full of messages for friends who are behind, helpful info about conditions ahead left by people going the other way, or sometimes just the thoughts and observations on life that people have been carrying with them as they walked along. Maybe they want to write them down in order to lighten their load. By the end of the summer, these are very "heavy" books.
Cut off from their property and possessions, and the usual roles and routines of their life, it's easier for people on the Trail to get to know each other and become friends. But I still would shy away from hiking the entirety of the AT, for fear of finding myself the member of yet another small, exclusive club. There are too many such clubs in the world, and I don't want to be a joiner anymore.