North Market

When I lived in Cleveland, I usually made a weekly grocery trip to West Side Market.  There was a fruit vendor I frequented to the point of her eventually offering me free pineapples, a bakery whose intensely popular pepperoni rolls inspired my own, and several flower vendors which seemed to be staffed only by young, attractive women, leading me to believe that they flirted with male shoppers enough to make them buy flowers for the women they actually knew out of sheer guilt.  I haven't been there in years.

After Christmas this past year, I stayed in Ohio for a few weeks to help my dad and brother with some home improvement jobs.  We ended up doing lots of work at my brother's place, and none at Dad's, but all three of us were very happy with what we accomplished.  On the day my brother, his wife, and their son took custody of me from The Girl, we made a couple stops on our way to Dad's.  The first was artistically inspired.  The second was North Market.

Many of the vendors had some sort of samples available.  My brother, carrying Nephew on his shoulders, offered a pretzel stick to the furious primate.  Nephew was insistent on trying the dip accompanying the pretzels, but that was a hot sauce vendor, and there's no way that would end well, so my brother turned and walked away, putting the "dips" out of reach, out of sight, and out of mind.  Sadly, nobody was carrying me, so I stuck a pretzel stick in one of the center dip bowls, assuming that meant it was in the middle of some abstract Scoville spectrum.  Now my brother giggles while telling people how I started clapping him on the shoulder, crying "it burns!  it burrrrns!!"  I wouldn't say crying, exactly, but I was very happy to accept a sample of yogurt from the next vendor stall.

after the hot sauce, I was afraid to try the Tunisian Chicken.

North Market is a little smaller than West Side Market, and seems geared more towards prepared foods than raw ingredients, but that's probably a good choice for the area.  If I worked nearby, I'd likely show up often to try exotic and interesting things for lunch.  Their open-weekdays schedule supports this practice; WSM is only open three weekdays and Saturdays.

How do they keep the swan from browning?

My hosts for the day shared a bowl of ice cream; I don't remember the flavors, but I think salted caramel was involved.  That was about the same time I was salving my oral burns with free yogurt, so I admit I wasn't really focusing on what my brother had ordered.

No, there are no available samples of lobster ravioli.  Please stop asking, sir.

I don't think my brother had been to the North Market before that day.  All three of the adults felt bad that we made our visit shortly after a large brunch, leaving no room for any of the interesting meal options we saw on display.  The energetic primate in our midst was more upset that we wouldn't let him run wild.

The bin is nearly empty.  Does that mean high popularity, or small batch size?

Questions I get about backpacking

When I reached a point where lots of people knew about my thru-hike next year, I started getting a lot of questions about it.  I loved that, because it gave me free reign to talk about something I had largely kept to myself for nearly a year.  But the thing about conversations like that is that you often learn just as much from the questions as the other person does your answers.  For instance, it's easy for me to spot other backpackers, because they generally only have two questions: Northbound or Southbound?  and How much does your pack weigh?  After that, they may get into more details, like which stove you chose, or how you're going to treat water, but they always open with one of those two.

I'll start with those.

Northbound or Southbound?
Northbound (see also: NOBO or GAME).  Most thru-hikers go north for a reason: it saves the difficult White Mountains for the end of the hike.  By that time, you've been training for months, and are trail-hardened for anything.  My mom's uncle hiked it southbound, and even he recommended I go north.  Plus, a big part of why I want to hike the AT is to take Mom's ashes with me.  When I was in college, my brother, my dad, and I spread some of her ashes on Springer Mountain, in Georgia, and I feel like heading north from there gives the trip better continuity.

How much does your pack weigh?
With the gear I have now, ten days of food (I don't plan to ever carry ten days of food again if I can help it), and all my cold-weather gear, my pack weighs about 35 pounds.  That's what I remember from my Shenandoah hike in October.  I received a lighter water filter and bottles for Christmas, and if I get a chance to play with my new alcohol stove and get comfortable with it, I can shave some weight there, too.  However, 35 pounds doesn't take my passenger into account, so I'd like to cut more weight, if I can.  Unfortunately, I think I've reached a point where shedding more weight will get really expensive, and probably require changing my tent and the pack itself.  I think the more likely option is better food purchases.  I took a lot of food to SNP that I never ate, even accounting for the extra food I knew I wouldn't need.

I also get lots of questions from people who either aren't backpackers, or don't have much experience with this kind of backpacking.  These are some of my favorites.

Are you taking a knife?
Yup.  I have a tiny Leatherman (another good place to shave weight would be replacing this with a tiny Swiss Army knife that just has a blade, scissors, and tweezers.  I used to have one, but it's disappeared since I was in Scouts).
That's it??  What if you have to cut off your arm or something??
I don't think you understand where I'll be hiking.  I'm really not concerned about that possibility.

How many changes of clothes are you taking?
I'm not.  Extra clothes are what people use to fill up their dressers, and I'm not taking a dresser.  I want that space--and that weight--available for food.  I will take layers of clothing, so I can adjust my insulation according to weather, and a rain shell for when it gets wet, windy, or very cold.
Ok, but what about underwear?
Under where?  Most of the time I'll wear running shorts, which have a liner.  When it gets cold, I have a pair of merino wool leggings which are surprisingly cozy for something you can see through.

Aren't you worried about bears?
I'm only worried that they'll run away so fast that I won't be able to get a good picture.  Bears are generally timid and don't want to mess with people.  On the other hand, people doing stupid or foolish things in the woods have led bears to believe that people have the best food, and many people don't know how to store it in the backcountry.  When bears get accustomed to finding food in camp areas, they return to those areas for more food.  I may have to deal with a bear that has been trained by past hikers to steal my food.  Luckily, most shelters along the AT have some provision for hanging food out of ursine reach.  I'll probably take some cord so I can hang my own bear bag, should I be forced to camp in a place that has no such amenity.
Well, what about wolves?  or snakes?  or ticks?
In the past 60 years, there has not been a single documented case of a wolf attacking a human in North America.  Snakes are like bears; they're not going to bother me if I leave them alone, and besides taking pictures when I get the chance, I leave snakes alone (occasionally, when I can identify a species as non-venomous, I may move it out of the trail for its own safety).  Besides, the areas of the trail where snakes are most prevalent will probably be behind me by the time it's warm enough for them to be out gallivanting.  Ticks and pathogens are my only real concerns.  When Turtle and I hiked the overlooks in Virginia, we would stop at the end of every patch of high grass or other greenery that overhung the trail and checked our legs for passengers.  He led the way through most of that, so he found far more than I did, but that practice will continue this year.  If I find any ticks on me, I intend to do it while they're still looking for a picnic spot, not after they've made camp.  Dad provided me with a new filter for Christmas, and I'm confident that it will effectively treat my water.  Oddly enough, one of the bigger risks to hiker health is other hikers; many think that living in the woods means abandoning all hygiene practices, and those are the people sharing your shelters.  Online forums are full of reports of sick hikers sharing illnesses at shelters.  I plan to stick to my tent for a long time, and only accepting sealed food from others.

What if you wake up one morning and just decide that you're sick of it, and don't want to hike anymore?
I think that's unlikely.  But let's say it happens.  How often do you wake up in the morning and decide that you're sick of it, and don't want to go to work that day?  Starting March 10, my job is hiking to Maine.  If there's a day I don't feel like hiking, I'll probably hike anyway, because it's my job.

Are you taking anything for protection?
Someone asked me this question in front of The Girl, who immediately acted shocked and asked of them just WHAT kind of trip did they think this was, ANYWAY??  After we finished laughing, they clarified, "seriously? a gun, a knife, what?"  No.  Definitely no.  The most powerful firearm I own bears the NERF logo.  I've fired .22 rifles, and have no other firearm training at all.  Furthermore, guns are illegal on many parts of the trail, heavy over the entire trail, and entirely unnecessary.  People seem to think I'm trekking through a warzone.  It's Appalachia, for pete's sake.  I'll be safer there than I am in D.C.

The most interesting question I've heard was actually asked of The Girl by a friend of hers.
Aren't you afraid he's going to spend too much time in his own head?
I thought that was impressively insightful for someone I don't know, but if she had known me, she also would have known the right answer, delivered by The Girl: "He already does that."  Unemployment has given me two solid years to muck about deep inside my brain.  I won't meet any demons on this trip I haven't already taken to lunch.  At least, not the internal kind.

Have any more questions?  I'm not an expert on backpacking (yet), but I am the world's leading expert on my plans.  Ask soon--I leave in less than a month.

Blockheads

When my brother took custody of me from The Girl just after Christmas this winter, our first stop was the Columbus Museum of Art.  My brother and I were both excited to see the exhibit of Lego Art (this turned out to be art both About and Of Lego).  There were a couple smaller, interactive installations on the first floor which allowed visitors to make their own creations and leave them on display, and an exhibit of models built by local students and adults.  I saw a tiny card on an otherwise empty shelf proclaiming "the Lego mouse was here," and naturally assumed the little bugger was still lurking nearby.  I finally spotted him on some moulding upstairs.

He was keeping an eye on the actual Lego exhibit, which included Cutaway Man-style models of two minifigures (each was taller than Nephew, throwing serious doubt upon the descriptor "mini") and some paintings, but I was much more interested in the art made of Legos.  Unfortunately, so was Nephew, who didn't understand why he wasn't allowed to play with anything in this room full of great toys, and was even more frustrated when we wouldn't even let him touch the ground, because that was the quickest path to aforementioned toys.  We didn't spend much time in the Lego gallery.

"Bicycle Triumphs Traffic," as it should.

We did get to see enough to appreciate the beauty of the brick, and the inventiveness of many of those who work in that medium, including several examples I had already seen in the fantastic Beautiful LEGO book, which my aunt had from the library when I visited over Thanksgiving.  I'll admit that Nephew and I both made a lot of the same excited noises in that room, and I was just as frustrated as he was that we didn't get to play more.

Detail of "Bicycle Triumphs Traffic."  The vehicles surrounding the bike were made from over 75,000 Lego bricks by visitors to a Lego fan event in North Carolina.

Trail Names

Back in May, at the shelter where we set up our tents on the first night, we met T-Square.  "You must be an engineer!" I responded upon hearing his name.  "Yes, I am, retired nuclear."  Later, he asked me what kind of engineer I am.  "Unemployed."

On the same hike, after our group reduced in size by half, we met FedEx, who works for the shipping giant and used to hike in a vest with their logo, and Sunnie Falls, who hoped to finish the AT in the summer between the end of her high school career and the start of college in the fall.  When she couldn't find a better pair of replacement shoes, she had bought a pair of Crocs and had thru-hiked about half of the trail in them since then.  I don't know whether it was the same pair for that duration.  We also met Yellow Jacket (wearing a blue jacket), a woman in her... late fifties?... who was on her last day of her last section of the AT when we met her.  She told us that every day at 10 AM, she had a Snickers bar in memory of a friend who had done the same, and died of cancer months after finishing his thru-hike.

In the Shenandoah, I met Handyman and later learned of the random connection between us through his son.  Handyman had been hiking with Cakes ("Like in Johnny Cakes"); Boulderdash informed me that Cakes held the record for longest sustained fart on the Appalachian Trail.  Two days later, Skurks caught up with me, and I finally met Slim, whom I'd heard about from the other guys I'd met in the park.

On my first backpacking trip last year, I introduced myself to a pair of ladies partly to be friendly, but mainly because I wanted to learn about the pack one of them was carrying.  Grieze was clearly alarmed when Timber told me her real name, but if it helps, I've since forgotten it.  That's the thing about trail names: they are not the labels we have grown into, but the labels which define who we've become.  I've always felt that you can't give yourself a nickname, and that the people who do invariably choose something they think will sound more impressive than the rest of us generally believe them to be, but a trail name is different.  Grieze ("Greezy") explained hers by telling me that she just sometimes feels crabby.  Timber falls.  Boulderdash felt like that's what he was doing during a particularly rocky section of the trail.  Handyman has a home improvement business.

I think you can pick your own trail name, but I've also heard that it's best to have yours before you start the AT, or risk getting stuck with something applied to you by other hikers.  Just imagine what Cakes could have been called.  The Girl has said that I am good at naming things, but I have yet to pick a trail name.

On my very first AT hike, Mom called me IronKid because I seemed unstoppable, but I think I might be too old to get away with that one anymore.  I like Treefrog because I carry one (I also have strong legs, climb trees, and make a lot of noise at night).  The Girl's entire family thinks I should be Ryno, because that's what her nephew calls me.  I admit it's pretty good (as is the variant Ryno Dino--I sometimes run like a velociraptor when carrying him piggy-back), but I feel like it would be more fitting to use something my nephew calls me.  The problem is, he calls me Mom.  He also calls his mom and several household objects Mom, and occasionally uses Mom as a verb, command, adjective, or expostulation.  Diagramming his sentences is a nightmare.

After a few days without a shower, I think I smell like a Bad Onion.  The Girl calls me a Master Baker (maybe because I'm known for my Bagels?), usually while laughing inexplicably, but she thinks I should be Snake Bait.  After the Shenandoah hike, when I was invariably the first hiker out of camp each morning, and thus the first to catch my face in every single spiderweb, we both liked Web Walker.  I've considered Off Belay, for one obvious reason, and because when you're off belay, you have reached a point of safety, where you can take care of yourself, and I like to think that's how the trail will treat me.  Back in May, I considered Branch (it was almost my real name, I'm a branch of my family tree, and there are branches on trails, trees, and streams, each of which I'll see plenty of this year), but for some reason I think a trail name should have more than one syllable, and I have no rationale for that whatsoever.

However I label myself, I need to decide soon; my feet hit the trail on March 10.  Any suggestions?