5/25/93 – Tue.

It was another long day, and again I make my entry by candlelight. I keep thinking about Abraham Lincoln. I think about the purist image more than of the real man — of eyes gone bad due to excessive reading by the light of candles, of honesty, and of deep concern for his fellow man.

It started raining about 6:00 this morning and has not really stopped since. Ron & John go up at the first sound of sprinkles, but Dave and I both decided to try to wait it out. had we stuck our heads out of the tents, we would have realized that this was an overcast drizzle-all-day rain rather than a simple spring shower. At about 7:15 I went ahead and got up and broke camp. I was on the trail by 8:00 (Dave was still in his tent), and caught up with Ron & John by 10:00. I can really see that I have been conditioned by the weeks on the trail.

We all stopped at Cold Gap Shelter to fill up our water bottles and to try to dry out a bit. I was much more successful with the former than the latter.

One of the hooks on my (Dad’s) boots broke, and trying to lace around it has not been successful. I am going to try just punching a hole in the boot and lacing through it.

I made it into Fontana Village by 3:00, and had completed all my business (picked up maildrop, mailed a package home, bought butter, talked to Mom, and tried to talk to Julie) and made it out to the Fontana Dam Shelter (the “Fontana Hilton”) by 5:30. Bearanoid, Christy, and Justin are all here, so it was easier to catch them than I had thought. Troll and Bushwack have not shown up yet, so it looks like I will be in the company of familiar faces for the next few days regardless of my pace.

“Strider” is also here. He is a legend of sorts on the trail, as he is mentioned several times in every trail journal, and has taken over a month to get this far. He was a Sig Ep Class of ’72 (’71?) at Ohio State and, oddly enough, looks like Chuck Hafemann, the Mass Delta (MIT) Sig Ep Alumni Board president. He says he has had four major careers (medicine, restaurants, sales, & construction) and has held over 300 jobs. Bushwack’s got nothing on him for free-spiritedness!

I had a long and interesting talk with Ron (and periodic input by Justin, Christy, and John). It started on the subject of relationships, including marriage, living together, divorce, and pre-marital sex. It wound up on religion, and Ron said that Jesus is like the groom and his followers are like his brides. He said the key to religion is to see it as a relationship. Somewhere, he kind of lost me, but he is more than willing to talk about it without preaching. I am planning on an easy day tomorrow (my left ankle has started bothering me a bit), so I will probably share a shelter with him tomorrow night and do some follow-up. It’s like talking to Bill Golightly.

I had planned on writing some postcards tonight, but it is really too late.

I am pretty sure that the Fontana Hilton was where Julie left me a note that, 15 years later, I still carry around in my wallet (I had it laminated a decade ago). Sticking to my promise not to embarrass others as I put in these entries (although Julie has already told me that she is getting a little embarrassed), I won’t publish that note here!

I was struck by the Bill Golightly reference in this entry. Bill is a certifiable “hoot” (you’ll have to track him down in the Grand Canyon to get a definition of what that is) who we met through my parents. We met him one night, and, the very next night, camped on a riverbank with he, his son Jeff, and Jeff’s girlfriend, while my parents drive around all night thinking that Jeff might be an axe murderer and that we had been abducted. That’s, obviously, the highly abridged version. Bill’s a hoot. Jeff, his son, is a great guy. It was all one big, fat communication mix-up that got straightened out the following morning. And Bill wound up presiding over Julie’s and my wedding.

5/24/93 – Mon.

First time to miss any days of entries here. As an excuse I can only point to the Doug Stone song, “I Was Too Busy Being in Love.” Julie did meet me in Wesser, and we had a wonderful two days together. Words really cannot express what a wonderful feeling it is to wake up with her nestled up against me. We were both fairly emotional once we were alone together, and I honestly felt that I never wanted to end the embrace. I would be lost without her (pardon the cliche), and returning to the trail was an awfully bittersweet thing. We drove up to Fontana Dam to stash a 6-pack of beer for Bearanoid at the shelter. He had continued on at Wesser, rather than taking a break. I guess I will soon find out whether or not the beer made it undisturbed until he got there.

I got back on the trail at about 8:45 this morning. Shawn, a guy I had met in Wesser, said that Troll and Bushwack had left about a half-hour earlier. I spent most of the day expecting to catch up with them, only to realize that I had been misinformed and they were behind me. That, combined with a pretty dry stretch of the trail, left me covering 16 miles today! That included the ascent of Cheoah Bald and some other rather nasty uphills. So, I am using the candle lantern for the first time to make this entry, and I plan to read some of E.B. White’s One Man’s Meat, which Julie bought for me.

I saw a small snake today that (I think) might have been a very young rattler. I also saw a couple of wild turkeys, so perhaps my wildlife-sighting luck is about to change.

I’m camped tonight about 2.5-3.0 miles beyond Stecoah Gap with a couple of guys from Kentucky (Ron and John) and a guy named Dave who had stayed with us at Tray Mountain shelter. Ron is about to enter divinity school (I don’t think he has entered yet), and John is an upholsterer. John’s father went to M.I.T. and helped Henri Heimlich develop the Heimlich Maneuver. John is kind of quiet, but Ron is talkative and funny. They are carrying a lot of stuff (their packs weigh ~75 lbs.). They have an MSR Whisperlite stove like mine, and had to deal with a clogged jet last night without a wrench or a cleaning wire. I gave them my extra cleaning wire and wrench, which Dad would probably think was a reckless thing to do. But Dad is not here, the cleaning tool has two different wires (so if one breaks there is a built-in backup), and I would pretty much have to lose my stove to lose the tools. Also, my Leatherman has a pair of pliers. I ramble.

With a little bit of luck, I will make Fontana early enough tomorrow to get into town before the post office closes and get back out before dark. If I go into town tomorrow instead of Wed., I will be able to call Julie.

I have no idea why I would not have been able to call Julie on Wednesday. All I can imagine was that she was going to be on the road somewhere and unreachable. 1993. Long before everyone had a cell phone!

5/16/93 — Sun.

We made over 16 miles today, leaving just over 10 miles to get to the Rainbow Springs Campground. We went so far, I think, partly because it was relatively level, and partly because the campground (showers) is a pretty big carrot dangling in front of Dad’s and Dan’s noses. We are camped tonight at Betty Creek Gap.

Tomorrow, it’s Rainbow Springs, and then I will be on my own. Hopefully, I will be able to make Fontana Dam by Friday, and meet up with Dad there.

My thought/idea for today was to write a play about someone hiking the A.T. I didn’t get much farther than that, but it seems like all I need is a good idea for a main character, and I’d be off and running. I’ve got several months to get ideas from people I meet on the trail. We stayed last night in the shelter with a guy named Bush-Wack [sic] (real name: Victor). He had been hiking with Troll, but couldn’t quite keep up. He’s kind of a "free spirit," as Dad says with a certain amount of distaste. He was in the Army (stations in Panama for three years), has hiked a big chunk of the Pacific-Crest Trail, and most recently comes from working in a hotel in California. He doesn’t carry a stove — cooks his dinner on the fire every night. Every night he eats lentils, beans, rice, and barley (the same recipe Dad has) boiled for 30 minutes in water. For breakfast he eats oatmeal and hot chocolate mix mixed in cold water (yuch!). Sometimes he throws some Ramen noodles in with his dinner mix, for variety. He doesn’t eat lunch. It’s probably the cheapest way to go, but worse than any diet study I would ever do. When at a shelter, he still sleeps outside on clear nights (likes to sleep under the stars), his machete stuck in the ground near to his head (yes, his machete — almost 2 feet long). It’s probably a good thing that he sleeps outside — Dan says he’s one of the loudest snorers he’s ever heard, although it didn’t bother me. He’s an interesting character, all right.

There are also three guys who we have heard about but not seen: Turtle, Snail, and Slug. They started the day after we did, and they are loaded down with juggling equipment. Apparently, they’re quite good…at juggling. Rumor has it that their whole trip is planned out on the computer, but they are already down to one box of macaroni & cheese and are supplementing their diet with edible plants. They’re from Las Vegas, which just goes to build up my belief that that city produces some real wackos [sic]. Bets are that they haven’t made it out of Georgia yet and have little chance of finishing the trail. Bush-wack [sic] even said they were a strange bunch!

As it turned out, two of the three jugglers did indeed drop out fairly quickly. The third one continued on and actually flip-flopped. He’ll crop up some time in September, I think, as I spent the night with him in a shelter in New Hampshire or Maine. We’ll see if I manage to cross-link back to this post when we get there!

The play…never even got started. I’ve learned in the past fifteen years that, while I’m a decent writer, and I enjoy it…that’s only for certain types of work. I haven’t had a solid idea for a piece of fiction since I was in college, despite how much I enjoy reading it.

As for the diet study reference, while I was in college, a number of my fraternity brothers and I made some money on the side by participating in medical studies at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. Most of the studies we did were ones where we were a control group for some sort of geriatric-oriented study. The exact format of the studies varied slightly from one to the other, but most of them meant we had to eat the same three meals — low sodium, and with portions measured out to the fraction of an ounce — every day for anywhere from 3 days to a couple of weeks. We had some input into what the meals were, but, let me tell you, nothing tastes good the fifth day in a row that you’ve had it for dinner! These studies were win-win, especially during MIT’s "Independent Activities Period" (IAP) every January — our house didn’t provide meals then, so this was a way to get paid several hundred dollars while also having our meals taken care of.

One downside was that, not only was there strict monitoring of our intake, but there was strict monitoring of our liquid output. For many of the studies, we spent every night in the hospital, but we were out during the day — lugging around a backpack with a gallon jug with a very good sealing lid.

We got to know the nurses in the Clinical Research Center (CRC) fairly well. Apparently, working in the CRC was a fairly sought-after gig, as the majority of the patients were actually…healthy. Occasionally, there would be overflow from the other beds in the hospital, but, for the most part, we had the run of the place and all enjoyed flirting with the nurses, who were very good sports.

One other aside about that whole experience. There were enough of us from the same fraternity cycling through on studies that were managed by the same doctor, that she noticed a pattern of anemia in her "healthy" test subjects. She actually put many of us on iron supplements and, if I recall correctly, called up our cook advising him to try to work some additional leafy vegetables and red meats into our menu! I don’t know that that did much good, as we payed poorly and wound up with a couple of real characters as cooks.

I don’t have much time to write this evening, as I have been puttering around camp and the sun is about to disappear.

We started out great this morning, refreshed from our weather-brought rest yesterday afternoon, and walked the 7.1 miles to the Deep Gap shelter with only one break. We stopped there for lunch (Troll had done the same and was still there when we got there), dried out some of our stuff, filled our water bottles, and resumed hiking at 2:15. We only made another 4.6 miles before stopping to camp about 1.1 miles past Dick’s Creek Gap. Dan was already here, and he and Dad are kicking around different ways to kill time once we get to the Rainbow Springs Campground (Dad as to when his flight leaves and Dan as to when his wife can get off work to come pick him up).

I remain frustrated at the slow pace, and it obviously shows. I know Dad cannot go any faster, but i am really itching to see how I will do on my own. Troll is going to spend the weekend in Fontana Village with his girlfriend next weekend, so hopefully that will give me time to catch up. I plan to spend a rest day there and get some postcards written.

I am beginning to think that I will tell Mike & Tomjay not to hike with me. I think I have gotten in "hiking shape," and they would slow me down, unleashing all the frustrations I am now feeling with Dad.

I had no memory that "Mike and Tomjay" were ever thinking about doing some hiking with me. They were my two closest friends in college. As a matter of fact, we’ll be staying with Mike when we head to our 15-year college reunion this summer. Needless to say, they did not come out and hike with me. Ron — my "best friend since 7th grade" did, and Julie did. I have positive memories of both, so maybe I just needed to get some solo experience under my belt before I became an obnoxiously mile-hungry hiker.

5/9/93 — Sun.

We made about twelve miles today and are staying in Gooch Gap Shelter. Today was full of steep ascents and descents, and Dad almost didn’t make it the last couple of miles. But, we did, and we have a long day tomorrow if we’re going to to make it to Blood Mountain. I guess I’ll stop writing that we hiked up and down a lot, because it seems like that’s a given.

We’re sharing the shelter tonight with an older couple (50s?) that are on Day 6 of their hike from Amicalola, so we should not feel so bad. however, we are also sharing the shelter with a guy about my age who hiked all the way from Springer Mtn. today (~17 miles). He passed us at Hightower Gap and is planning to average 17 miles a day (he’ll be done by mid-September).

I’m thinking about unloading a lot of little stuff on Dad when he leaves, as my perspective as to the relative importance of some of my gear has changed in the past two days.

Dad no longer thinks he’ll be able to make it to Fontana Dam by next Friday. Only time will tell.

P.S.

We also saw some Army Rangers on maneuver (they were not allowed to use the trail).

The lady in the shelter had an inflatable sink — and that was after they’d jettisoned some of their “unnecessary” equipment.

Again, I was a bit snot-nosed when it came to cracking the whip on my dad. I don’t need to read ahead to know that this is going to get more embarrassing for me before it gets better, as my attitude on that front has come up on numerous occasions over the years.

Considering that, now, with both of us being 15 years older, my dad is in much better shape than I am and would almost assuredly walk circles around me if we returned to the start of the A.T. again… let’s just say I’m not proud about my attitude. If anything, my comments in my journal understate the comments I was making throughout the time he hiked with me.