Nocturnal auditory signatures

While I was home helping Dad cut down everything murdered by the ash borer, I noticed something that I really liked. The sound of Dad's yard is unique to me.

When I was in junior high, I spent the night at a friend's house. He had a tepee in the back yard, and after a few hours of bonfire, we crawled into it for the night. Things slowly settled down (teenage boys are biologically incapable of settling down quickly. If you think that we have, we are fooling you), and eventually we were ready to actually sleep.

Then I heard the roaring.

"What the hell is that??"

"The neighbor's lions."

"...When you say 'lions'..."

His neighbor across the road had a couple lions in a pen. "Across the road" sounds close, but my friend's house (and tepee) were at the far end of a half-mile long driveway through dense forest. I don't know how far away the lions were, but their growls carried through the night, the trees, and the thin canvas walls of our shelter. I wasn't afraid; I was fascinated. I was thrilled. Lions!! I fell asleep grinning after listening to them for ages.

In high school, we spent a week on Hilton Head Island in my great-aunt's time-share. We went out walking at night and heard the bellowing of mating alligators. We never saw them; we just heard them, the growls carrying far through the swampy areas.

I developed a useful skill in college. The campus was in an urban area near a hospital and railroad tracks. Occasionally, police helicopters with searchlights would fly overhead. Trains, sirens, and medical helicopters were commonplace. Now I don't hear any of those when I sleep. On several bike rides and a few hikes, we've camped near train tracks and everyone else will stumble out of their tents in the morning complaining about the trains all night long, and I never hear any of them.

Along the trail last year, I learned a few things about whippoorwills. They love to nest near shelters and tent sites, they are nocturnal, and they will inexhaustibly defend their territory by singing at it. For hours. One night, I set up my tent at a border zone between three whippoorwills, and heard them each singing at the others as I set up my tent, got water, stretched, made dinner, wrote in my journal, and read for a while. I met one hiker who said that he hated whippoorwills because his childhood bedroom had a nest nearby, and that he never slept at night when they were present. I loved them.

At Punchbowl Shelter, which was rumored to be haunted, there is a small pond full of singing frogs. My trail name was Treefrog; I fell asleep listening to the songs of my people. (peeple?) Later, in Maine, we camped at a shelter on a pond where I could hear four distinct species of frogs singing. It was fantastic.

In the south, I often heard owls. I could recognize the barred owl by its call because I'd done a lot of research on them after one of my training hikes. I'm not that good with other species, but at Overmountain Shelter (the Barn), I could hear four different types of owls calling out in the woods. One of them was barred. I can only guess at the others.

In the far north, we were occasionally lucky enough to hear loons. They will call throughout the day, but the sound is especially clear--and unsettling--at night, when their eerie voice echoes in the darkness.

Each place has its own night sounds. At Dad's, I lay in bed at night and listened to the very specific chorus of chirring bugs and singing frogs, and it felt instantly familiar. It was the same sound I listened to as a kid, falling asleep every summer evening. No other back yard sounds quite like Dad's, and as much as I love the sounds of all those other places, that's the place that sounds like home.

Almost There

Today is my anniversary. A year ago today (around lunchtime), I reached the summit of Mount Katahdin and officially finished my Appalachian Trail thru-hike.  Of course, I still needed to hike back down, but what's five or six more miles?

A couple weeks ago, I posted a chapter from the manuscript I wrote about my hike. I'm still waiting to hear back from a few of the agents I queried, but so far there have been no takers. Keep your fingers crossed! Maybe to mark this occasion, I'll post another chapter today. This is the very first chapter of the book. I hope you like it, but I really hope it will show up in your bookstore someday soon.

Almost There

Later, a friend of mine would refer to her as “the crazy lady.”  That’s no way to narrow down the vast field of characters you meet on the Appalachian Trail, except in terms of gender.  It’s also pretty judgmental, coming from a guy who got so dehydrated and hungry that he hallucinated unicorns shortly before meeting her.

I didn’t think that she was genuinely crazy.  Not any more than any other person who grabs a pack and decides to spend a few months hiking between Georgia and Maine.  Like the cat said, “We’re all mad here.”  The specific flavors of crazy vary a bit, but I’d like to be very clear on one point before we delve too deeply into my 2014 Appalachian Trail thru-hike: I never met anyone who I thought posed any genuine danger to me or others.  There were one or two people I didn’t really like, but it was mostly a vague feeling of disinterest.  I just didn’t want to hang out with them.  I never met anyone that I thought was going to pull a knife while I was sleeping and start poking it into people.

This woman was, if anything, overly optimistic, and maybe a little naïve about the scope of what lay before her.  To be fair, that’s how everyone starts a thru-hike.  My little party was four northbound (or NOBO) thru-hikers.  We had met each other individually earlier along the trail, and had serendipitously come together as a group at Winturri Shelter, just north of Rutland, Vermont.  She was hiking alone.  I met her a little before noon on June 29.  I had spent the morning climbing South Horn and Bigelow Mountain, with a ten-minute break on Avery Peak, and was heading down the other side when I met her on her way up.  I’d already seen my highest elevation for the day, but mosquitoes whining incessantly in my ears the night before had kept me from getting any sleep, so I was exhausted, and I confess that although I smiled and listened attentively when she spoke with me, a persistent part of my brain was annoyed that I couldn’t return to the day’s work of getting to West Carry Pond until the conversation ended.  I wasn’t proud of that part of me, so I shoved it in a corner and ignored it as best I could.

“Good morning,” I had opened.

“Hi!” She beamed at me, overflowing with the giddy optimism I remembered from my first weeks on the trail.  Hell, I could remember having it as recently as ten days earlier, but somewhere in between I’d crossed an invisible line, and was now powered by sheer force of will to see this thing finished.  She was southbound, or SOBO, so she had only been on the trail for a couple of weeks.  I was on track to finish in less than ten days.  “What’s your name?”

I stood to one side of the trail, which in that section was a long, sloped sheet of granite canted slightly to one side.  It had been like that most of the way down from the summit, with intermittent stands of small, scrubby trees. Smiling through my exhaustion, I told her, “Treefrog.”  For the first few days on the trail, your brain stumbles on that question, unsure whether to respond with your given name or your “trail name,” which is a bit like a CB handle for hikers.  It becomes your identity so quickly that I started correcting other hikers who would answer “James” or “Ellen” by reminding them that they were “Beans” or “Hoof It.”  In Tennessee, I tried to order a pizza as “Treefrog” and the 50ish woman at the counter drawled, “Are you serious?” with such nasal disbelief that my brother Chris, who was visiting me at the time, barely made it outside before doubling over with laughter.

She gazed past me, up the slope that would lead her to views of Flagstaff Lake and the peak named for Myron Avery, the man who did most of the hard work of making the Appalachian Trail a reality after Benton MacKaye came up with the idea.  MacKaye is more well known, but Avery actually got things done.  It was head in the clouds versus feet on the ground, traits which are both experienced in a very literal sense by the people enjoying the combined efforts of the two men.  “Almost there,” she breathed, with what I took to be an almost reverential awe.

Nodding, I looked back over my shoulder.  “Yeah, not much further, you’ll be at the top.”  I’d been on both sides of similar conversations for almost four months, but most conversations between people who have just met on the trail become routine after a little while.  Same questions, different answers.  What’s your name?  When did you start (an easy, unobtrusive way to determine which of you is faster)?  Where are you heading tonight?  If you see them again, or if the conversation lasts a while, you get into more detail.  Where are you from?  What do you do in The World?  What brings you to the trail?  Talk to the same person long enough, and you will, in dribs and drabs, get their life story.

She shook her head and looked at me like I’d missed the joke.  “No, that’s me.  Almost There.”

We talked a few minutes more, while she radiated good vibes and optimism and I waved half-heartedly at the few mosquitoes who had ventured above the treeline to bring me the itchy welts they saw as gifts that keep on giving.  Almost There had sold everything before starting her hike.  “Got rid of it all,” she said, nodding proudly.  With both hands, she pinched at a roll of stomach below her hip belt.  “Gonna get rid of this, too!”

I was warming to her.  I couldn’t help it.  I knew I’d make it to West Carry Pond in plenty of time.  My real concern was making it from there to the ferry across the Kennebec River the next day—really just a man with a canoe, but his canoe was the official route across the Kennebec, and if we didn’t make it across by the time he stopped service for the day at 11 AM, we’d have to backtrack 3.6 miles to the nearest campsite and wait for the next day.  Our little party was locked in to our schedule.  We had to finish on the 8^th, because that’s when my family would be there to give us a ride out of the park.  Two of the others had already purchased plane tickets for the 9^th—we couldn’t afford to lose a day.  Almost There had no such concerns.  She was past the Kennebec, and from here to Georgia all she had to do was keep walking, at whatever speed pleased her most.  In her mind, she wasn’t just beginning the hike, but the rest of her life.

“I haven’t decided yet what to do next.  I’ve lived in Maine all my life, but I think it’s time for a change. It’ll be hard saying goodbye, but maybe I’ll just keep going when I get to the end, you know?”

No, I didn’t know.  I knew that I wanted to sleep for about three days straight.  I knew that I felt capable of eating an entire salad bar myself, and chasing it with a pan of lasagna, and maybe some waffles and sausage, and a glass of milk.  I knew that if I saw another “Scenic Viewpoint” sign, I would react exactly as I had for the past week: with a middle finger and a dirty look, never breaking stride.  My body was depleted of all energy reserves.  The night before, I had used a borrowed cell phone to call my girlfriend and told her, nearly in tears, to cancel all hiking plans she had for us in Maine after I finished Katahdin.

But I remembered being where Almost There was.  Not physically, but spiritually.  I remembered practically glowing with excitement, even three months into the trip, knowing that I was finally doing something I’d wanted to do since I was eleven.  It made me happy to see her still so full of high spirits, still looking forward to an adventure I had almost completed.

“I’ve got my passport with me—I could just keep traveling!”  Maybe she would.  She wouldn’t even have to finish the trail.  Many people started a thru-hike and later decide it wasn’t what they expected.  Most of those just go home, but some maintain their momentum and go on to do something else.  In North Carolina, I’d met a man whose wife had to leave the trail when she dislocated her toe, but they were looking into a long-distance canoe trip to replace their thru-hike aspirations.  I suspect that there are an awful lot of people who set out on the trail hoping to find a new direction.  Almost There was the fourth person I’d met who’d sold everything, including their homes, before starting the journey, and their first post-hike task would be to find a new place to live.  I had met a 27-year U.S. Army veteran who set out on the trail to heal her soul, two men who had struggled with drug addiction and who viewed hiking as a form of rehab, and two people who hiked to recover from the death of a spouse.  To some degree, I think many people expect to experience some sort of revelatory change along the trail.  It was one of the questions I often fielded from people who knew a little about the trail, but had never completed a Long Hike themselves: How has it changed you?

I usually laughed it off, telling them that it had made me hairier, hungrier, and tired, because the truth of it is that those were the only changes in me I could discern.  Otherwise, I didn’t feel Changed so much as… Honed.  I had spent most of my life becoming someone who knew they could hike the Appalachian Trail, who had the physical ability and the mental discipline to succeed at such an endeavor, and although I spent 121 days proving that, I didn’t feel like I’d become a new person.  Still, I remembered having the bubbling cheeriness of Almost There, the bright hope for the trail ahead of me.  And, yes, the hope that it would change me somehow.  Most of my time after college had been spent in generally futile efforts to find gainful employment in my field, and although I’d had a few jobs, I’d spent almost as much time out of work, looking for a company that wanted me.  It wore me down, and eroded the confidence I’d taken so long to build.  I was generally a happy person, but I wasn’t really happy with where I was.  In time, that felt more like I wasn’t happy with who I was.  There was something very attractive about the idea of walking into the woods to disappear, and to be replaced, weeks or months later, by someone better.

68

One year ago today, I crossed the border into Maine, the state where Mom was born, on her 67th birthday. I was about two weeks from the end of my thru-hike, and I started the day in high spirits, even though the four friends who'd been hiking with me since Vermont had decided the previous evening to part ways with me for a few days.

This year, I'm working on getting my manuscript published.  I've written a book about hiking the Appalachian Trail, what led me to the trail in the first place, and why I took Mom's ashes with me.  Agents have been queried; now it's a matter of waiting for a favorable response, and constantly agonizing over whether my work is good enough to impress anyone.

Let's find out. Below is an excerpt from the manuscript, a single chapter from late in the trail. There are a couple references to earlier chapters, but I think it still stands alone well enough to be readable.  Why this chapter, instead of one more inspiring, uplifting, or funny? Because this chapter covers that day, one year ago, when I brought Mom home.  Happy Birthday, Mom.

Alone Again

          My friends left me.  The hike from Pinkham Notch had been harder on them than I’d realized, and during the night at Imp Shelter, they decided to stop at a hostel the next day.  I passed the hostel before noon, and was certain that they wouldn’t catch up with me by the time I reached Rangeley, our next planned resupply town.  They had tried to convince me to join them, plying me with the promise of beds, showers, laundry, and good food, but they lost me when they revealed their plan to slackpack for a day or so to conserve energy.  Slackpacking is when you hike with only a daypack, and a shuttle either drops you off at the start, or picks you up for the return, and you generally spend both nights at the same place.  Many hostels along the AT offer this service for free, even supplying the daypacks, because it encourages hikers to stay a second night and spend more money.  My decision wasn’t motivated by thrift, but conviction.  That wasn’t how I wanted to hike the trail.  I had never slackpacked, yellow blazed, or taken shortcuts, and I wasn’t going to start less than three hundred miles from the end.  It wasn’t my idea of thru-hiking.  I saw the hostel, gave the signs advertising baked goods and cold drinks no more than a passing thought after three meals from Simon and Irene, and kept hiking.  My friends had slept in, knowing they didn’t have far to go that day.  Doyi’s toes were in bad shape, and Ginko was getting crabby and short-tempered.  We all needed a rest, but I didn’t allow myself a break.  It required some rough climbing and difficult terrain, but that night I was rewarded with white lady’s slippers on the side trail to the Gentian Pond Shelter, which was oriented to provide a stunning view of the sunset over the valley below, and a few steps from the shelter I could hear where the pond drained into a waterfall that worked its way down to the valley.

          I left at five the next morning, June 23, my 106^th day on the trail, and what would have been my mom’s sixty-seventh birthday.  That was the day I entered Maine, the state where she’d been born, and where we would finish our 2,185.3 mile hike together, a dream we’d both had for decades, but only I would see completed.  The weather was beautiful, and I was filled with hope for the day, my eyes damp with all the importance I had heaped upon it.  As soon as I realized, days earlier, that I would cross the border on her birthday, I felt it would be auspicious.

          It was miserable.

          I’d had Gentian Pond and the shelter to myself for hours, and fell asleep by seven, excited at the prospect of nine and a half solid hours of sleep, but two section hikers I’d met and forgotten arrived at eight, making lots of noise, and tried to maintain a conversation that didn’t interest me.  I didn’t get to sleep again until well after nine.  My energy level was low throughout Mom’s birthday, and the trail was very rough.  In the south, I’d estimated my arrival times based upon a walking speed of three miles an hour, and I often arrived earlier than I’d expected.  In Maine, I would estimate arrivals based upon a speed of two miles an hour, and I was later than I’d hoped every single day.  Maine was brutal, and I was never sure whether it was because it was brutal all on its own, or because I got there after hiking almost two thousand miles in under four months.  The hiking machine was rapidly losing steam.

          The day I entered Maine, it took me almost twelve hours to go a little under fifteen miles.  One of those miles was Mahoosuc Notch, a section of trail described by my guidebook as the “most difficult or fun mile of the AT,” a jumbled maze of boulders I’d actually been looking forward to navigating, thinking that as a rock climber, I’d have a distinct advantage.  Before we stopped at Imp Shelter, we had planned on hiking through Mahoosuc early in the morning, when we were fresh, and helping each other through as a group.  I arrived at Mahoosuc in the afternoon, already tired, accompanied accidentally by Pack and Big Hungry.  Pack had a barely-noticeable lisp, and had already hiked the Pacific Crest Trail.  Big Hungry was a fourteen pound rat terrier he’d adopted from a shelter just before starting the AT.  She was so small that she didn’t carry a pack, as many trail dogs do, but spry enough that she had less trouble navigating Mahoosuc than Pack and I.  In one spot, she darted out of the way just as Pack fell on his way over a sedan-sized boulder and landed on his backpack where Big Hungry had been just a moment earlier.  I proudly congratulated myself internally, knowing that my skill and experience as a rock climber would easily get me over the obstacle, and moments later fell at exactly the same place after my foot slipped off exactly the same edge that had failed him.  I dropped six feet with windmill arms and wheelbarrow-handle legs before landing so hard on my right ass cheek that I was certain I’d be limping for the rest of the trip.  It took a minute or two before I could even stand up straight, and I was later surprised to see that I wasn’t purple halfway down my thigh.  I’ve never bruised easily off-trail, and I’d always assumed that it was thanks to a high-protein diet, but the jar of peanut butter I ate every four or five days didn’t seem enough to protect me after that fall.

          It took over an hour to get through Mahoosuc Notch, and the physical difficulty in passing it was only one factor; it’s not a well-blazed section, and Pack and I often had different ideas about where the trail went.  Sometimes neither of us knew, and it wasn’t until one of us found a new blaze and yelled to the other that we both got back on track.  I tore a new hole in one of my shoes, and then painfully drove the exposed toe onto the jagged edge of a chunk of granite on the north end of the notch, after I’d thought the worst was over.  By then, any excitement I’d had about Mahoosuc Notch had evaporated with my high hopes for Mom’s birthday, and the last shreds of my good mood from my final day in New Hampshire.

          Two hours later, I arrived at Speck Pond Shelter and creaked slowly to the floor.  I changed shoes and busied myself sweeping the shelter and arranging my bunk, then took what I needed to stock up on water from the spring, but returned with only enough to get me through the evening.  The blackflies in the area were fierce, and I only found relief from them by wearing my entire rain shell, because they easily bit through everything else I had.  I put on my other pair of socks, because the camp shoes Liz had mailed to me in Delaware Water Gap were made of a mesh material that provided easy access to my feet, and I constantly brushed my hands against each other and my face to keep the blood-sucking bastards off of my flesh.  One of them snuck in under my watch band and bit me on the wrist.  When blackflies bite you, you almost never feel it.  Blackflies carry an anticoagulant in their saliva; the first indication of a bite is pinprick marks on your flesh that bleed like open wounds.  Later, those pinpricks itch like crazy.  I realized I’d been bitten under my watch because when my sleeve pulled back, I saw a bright smear of blood on the cuff of my yellow rain jacket.  I spent most of my evening swearing and miserable, on the brink of tears.  Happy birthday, Mom.

          I stayed at Hall Mountain the next night, and felt a bit better because I’d eaten a filling dinner at Speck Pond, did a better job of hydrating, and to my boundless delight, Hall Mountain wasn’t clotted with fucking blackflies.  I still had one problem: because we’d stopped at Imp instead of Rattling River three nights earlier, I was no longer sure I had enough food to get me to Rangeley.  I’d planned on cooking a large dinner for my friends to celebrate entering our very last state, but we parted ways before that happened, so I knew I had enough dinners—I just didn’t have enough hiking food for the days between the dinners.  I was working out that math early in the afternoon when I stepped out onto B Hill Road, and as I looked for traffic, a van pulled up and stopped beside me.  Even before the gravel stopped crunching, Doyi leaned out of the passenger window, and a moment later the sliding door opened to reveal Socs, Ginko, and Catch Me.  They had gone from one hostel to another, and invited me to join them, but I was still adamant about not slackpacking.  Then they asked if there was anything else I needed, explaining that they were on their way into town for a resupply when they chanced upon me popping out of the woods.  “Actually, yeah—could you spare a couple granola bars, or a Snickers?  I have almost enough food to get to Rangeley, but I’d feel a lot better with two or three more snacks.”

          Doyi couldn’t reach his pack, but Ginko, Socs, and Catch Me immediately started handing me food, and I soon had more than I’d need—in fact, I had enough that I had two extra snacks that day as I finished my hike, and I would be hard pressed to decide whether the extra food or seeing my friends did more to boost my morale that afternoon.  Whichever it was, when I reached Hall Mountain Shelter at the end of my 107^th day on the trail, I was in such a good mood that I left my pack in the shelter and practically jogged up the mountainside behind it to an overlook—several days after I’d started giving the finger to “viewpoint” signs along the trail.  Socs had taken over my planning duties for the rest of the group, and she assured me that I’d see them again in Rangeley in two days.