Old Rag autumn

We volunteer on Old Rag in Shenandoah National Park, and we work on a two-season schedule.  In the winter, the rock scramble at the top of the mountain is often coated in ice and snow, and besides being dangerous, it's just not very popular in the coldest months. Springtime brings new leaves, lots of flowers, hordes of visitors, and our volunteer group.  We take a break during the summer, when high temperatures and thick humidity keep most visitors off the mountain.  Fall is a pretty big deal on Old Rag.  Cooler temperatures reduce the bug population, and the bald, rocky summit affords incredible views of the autumn colors throughout the surrounding valleys.

As I try to alternate between working on my book and posting about food and playing outdoors, I find old sets of pictures, which is why you're just getting fall colors posted here now, as we look toward the spring season on the mountain. Forgive me; the book has been a bit of an obsession of late.

The Girl was very proud of the lunch she packed for the day, and insisted it be recorded for posterity. This is what comes of me taking pictures of my new recipes. (those are sour cream chocolate chip cookies in the back)

Shenandoah panorama from the west side of the mountain.

I took some Legos with me to make an Announcement photo, for anyone who didn't already know.

A few trees provided bursts of color in the rock scramble.

With skies so clear, I can't resist a shot looking up through vivid leaves.

The Girl gleefully demonstrates wind strength at the summit.

Say hello to my little friends

Since returning from my hike, my screensaver has been a constant slideshow of my pictures from the Appalachian Trail.  I think it's great, because it often reminds me of moments I don't usually dwell on.  It gives me some ideas for things I still want to add to my manuscript, but it's not always great for productivity, because I sometimes find myself sitting and staring at the stream of pictures, grinning at stirred memories.

Some of my favorite shots (and some of my favorite shots to take) are when I can get really close to a very small subject, and show detail that might be missed by someone else.  Pebbles look like boulders, moss looks like a forest, and lizards loom like dragons.  I love that.  My camera has a pretty good macro function, and I got a lot of use out of it during the hike, though there were a couple times when I couldn't get the shot I wanted because I was too busy flailing at mosquitoes.

Hoar frost

Garter snake

Frosty limb in the Smokies

This young mouse has no fight or flight response at all.

Pollen collection in Harpers Ferry

Black rat snake

A few drops of water to me; a puddle for him.

Wood frog

A spider in the Whites.

These alpine blooms are smaller than your pencil eraser.

This chick was napping in the middle of the trail.  I briefly entertained a thought of adopting her like a parrot, but instead just moved her to where she wouldn't get trampled.

validation

I haven't posted here in a long time.  There was no single big reason, but several smaller ones, and most of them really aren't worth mentioning.  The biggest is that I was working on something else.

Before I started my hike last spring, I had already decided that I wanted to write about it.  I kept a careful journal each night of the hike (save one, on the night of what my friends and I agreed was The Worst Fourth of July Ever.  I wrote about that day on the 5th, for reasons too numerous to mention in a parenthetical aside), and frequently considered how I might describe the things I experienced along the way, the people I met, and the unbelievable discomfort of a toilet seat so cold that it prevented pooping.  Then I got home, and crashed hard.

For the first week or two, I barely moved.  I cooked, and I walked--very slowly--to the grocery.  People passed me on the sidewalk, which isn't something that usually happens to me, but my knees still ached, and my ankles, though improving quickly, still felt like they had broken glass in them.  As I shuffled along, distracted mothers pushed strollers past me, and a surly voice in the back of my head would growl, "Sure, you can pass me NOW--I just hiked two thousand miles this summer!!"

Thirteen days after my hike ended, I started writing.

I managed to take slightly less time writing about the trail than it took me to hike it.  To maintain a sort of false pressure on myself, I sent an updated copy of the manuscript to a friend at the end of every week.  To justify the email I would send her, I had to make significant progress in what I had written.  She was thrilled to get more details of my hike; I was thrilled that she seemed pleased with what I had written.

When I finished writing, I started over and read everything I had written, proofreading, correcting, and revising as I went.  I sent that second draft to the same friends, plus three other "test readers," and then closed the file.  I wanted to get feedback from people who didn't know my story.  Asking people to read 82,000 words of a deeply personal, revealing story is like showing up to a party stark naked and hoping nobody will notice you.  I was anxious and edgy for weeks.  Each Wednesday, I marked the passage of another week without word from any of my test readers.  When a month passed, I considered sending a reminder email to my tiny cadre of previewers to remind them that it was ok to say that they hated it, as long as they tried to tell me why.  I just needed to get some sort of feedback on what I had done.

This Saturday, I received a large manila envelope in the mail.  One of the readers had printed the entire manuscript and hand-written her thoughts in margins and on the backs of pages.  She'd caught some mistakes that I'd missed, and some of the annoying things people do when writing that drive me crazy when I see them elsewhere.  Somehow, I hadn't caught them all in my own work.  She also had lots of very helpful, insightful comments on the product taken as a whole.  As soon as I opened the envelope, I sealed myself in the bedroom and read everything she had written.  The Girl and her brother were in the living room watching Doctor Who, but I didn't care, because finally I'd heard back from someone who read my book, and more importantly: she'd liked it.

I was out late that night for unrelated reasons, but I still felt great until I finally got to bed at three in the morning.  For the first time since I'd finished the trail (which was itself the first time in a much longer period), I felt really good about something I'd accomplished.

Now there will hopefully be more feedback, more revisions, and then I'm going to try to get my book published.  It will be the second time I've tried to get a book through the gauntlet of publishing, and the first non-fiction attempt.  It's scary to think of it in such terms, but if all goes well, I won't be the naked guy at the party, I'll be naked in front of the world.  But I still want to do it.  I love writing.  I love sharing my adventures.  I'm not always comfortable sharing my pain and personal life, but this was a very personal story, and a very personal adventure.  I could say that I'm sharing it because it might help people, but I'm not the humanitarian people mistakenly assume that I am.  I'm doing it because I hope it helps me.

Dibs

We went to a LOT of weddings last fall.  A lot for me, anyway.  We did talk to one person who had seven in one year, and we only went to four, but that was in the course of two months, spread from Cleveland to Colorado.  The Girl and I were fairly evenly matched; two weddings were "my" friends (they both prefer her now) and the other two were her friends (no air-quotes necessary).  However, she wasn't in either wedding, while I, for the first time ever, donned a tux and stood by a friend on the day he put on the One Ring (it binds him).

For me, that was a bit of an adventure in itself.  Given the scope of the planning that went into this wedding, I think it might have qualified as an adventure for anyone who attended, and several people who might have just wandered past the festivities.  That's why I'm breaking my usual post schedule to put this up on the first anniversary of one of my best friends.  I wish you could have gone hiking with me, wanker, but I understand that there are extenuating factors to consider now.

I wish you both the best, C and M.  Happy anniversary, and many thanks for everything you do!

It's the glass pumpkin, Charlie Brown!

Remember our friend who does glassblowing?  She invited us to help again with her fall harvest of glass pumpkins.  I've only personally known one other person who did glassblowing, and she did it as a class; as she told it, the instructor did most of the work, but she got to make pumpkins as part of the class, and she was pretty excited about the results.  Our local glassblowing friend took a class in college, got into it, and now works on her own using rented time to produce all of her pieces (it's expensive enough to buy your own materials, but installing the kiln and other necessary appliances in your apartment would be ridiculous. And really, really hot).

The catch for her is that some of the work is easier to do when she has a little help.  Fortunately, I'd do that sort of thing for free because I like seeing how stuff is done, and I'm fascinated by learning new processes.  She's still willing to add the enticement of giving us one of the pieces we help make.  If you want your own, check out her store!

Wood forms have to be soaked in water so they don't burst into flames.  As it is, you still smell them smoking a little.

Newspaper has to be soaked, too, for the same reason.  It smokes a lot more, and ashy bits flake off and float around as she works.

This mold provides pumpkin-y ridges. 

That pinch point will be the top of the pumpkin.  Later, we break it from the blowpipe at that point, and the stem is added as a separate piece before the glass cools.

If pumpkins don't have a flat base, they roll away and shatter on the floor.

The pieces will slowly cool in this box over 12 hours.  Cooling faster will cause them to break.

Tools of the trade.

Prost!

A year ago today, The Girl and I were in Colorado, eating venison sliders and gourmet bacon-wrapped mac and cheese nuggets as appetizers between a friend's wedding and the dinner that followed.  Rain had botched many of our other plans for the trip, but we managed one good hike, a couple nice strolls, and a brewery tour.

This summer, I'm hiking the Appalachian Trail; the couple who got married in Colorado got engaged while backpacking in Wildcat Hollow, a backpacking trip I remember from my youth which for me was distinguished not by promises made, but by my aunt's encounter with pornographic fungus, my cousin's mental breakdown as she tried to play solitaire with a euchre deck, and my brother forgetting to take toilet paper when, in a fit of uncharacteristic modesty, he hiked at least three hundred yards from the trail before digging his cat hole.  It is arguable which of us had a more memorable time in Wildcat Hollow, but I don't want to make a contest of it.  I just have funny stories; my friends have each other, forever.

I wrote this post before leaving on my hike, because although they plan to visit at least once during my long walk north, I doubt it will be on this weekend, and I don't know yet whether I'll be off the trail in time to say this in a more personal manner, so I'm leaving it here to magically appear on the appointed day, and hope that they see it.

Happy anniversary, C and L.  Cheers!

The Girl took this picture on the night before the wedding, as we waited for our monster burgers.  They were delicious.

By the numbers

I went through my journals this morning and compiled a list. Some of these numbers may be off by a little (for instance, I lost track of how many round Treebeard, Margarita, and I bought for each other in Port Clinton), but the following gives a pretty good idea of how my hike went, in purely quantitative terms.

Pizzas consumed: 10
Beers consumed: 30
Burgers consumed: 15
Showers: 30
(tiny) loads of laundry: 10
Glasses of wine: 2
Nights I shared whiskey with other hikers: 5
Ice cream cones: 8
Ice cream sundaes: 7
Other ice cream (in gallons): 1.875
Sets of pole tips: 4
Pairs of shoes: 6
Pairs of camp shoes: 3 (one was given to a camper who had inexplicably lost her shoes; someone gave me a replacement pair, and I replaced those with something lighter that fit me better once i had the chance)
Pairs of socks: 3 (one was damaged while drying in front of a fire in the Smokies; one pair made it all the way from Springer to Katahdin)
Ticks found on my body: 7
Tick bites: 1
Mosquito bites: innumerable
Nights spent in hostels: 10 (one of those nights was in my tent on the hostel's back yard)
Zeros: 8
Neros (less than ten miles): 4
Catholes dug: 5
Catholes used: 4
Damsels rescued: 1
Books read: 5
Ponds I swam: 4
Rivers forded: I forgot to count those, but there were a lot more than I was supposed to have
Times I gave directions to shorter-term hikers: 6
Pack weight: 28-35 pounds
Passenger weight: 6 pounds
Calories consumed per day (estimated): 5,000
Nights spent alone: 8
People who came to see me start: 4
People who came to visit along the trail: 15
People who came to hike with me: 2
People who sent mail (and packages): 4
People who came to see me finish: 12
Generations of my family represented on the final day of my hike: 3
Generations of my family represented at dinner that night: 4 (my nephew was too young for Katahdin)
People who donated: 38
What they donated: $1,403
Disturbing mail: 2 (both were very well-wrought jokes)
Disturbing people: 3
People I met who I thought may pose a danger to me: 0
People I met who I thought may pose a danger to themselves: at least 6
Average speed (including zeros and neros): 18.06 miles/day
Days over 30 miles: 6 (I think)
Days that were really close to 30 miles: about the same
States: 14
Miles in the Hundred Mile Wilderness: 99.4
Trail Miles: 2,185.3
Days: 121
Bucket list items completed: 2 (same item, 2 lists)