2000 Miles

I’m back on trail, currently in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, where my view over the charmless faux-Alpine facade of a Super 8 motel takes in the top of the Gatlinburg Space Needle and, in the distance, a chair lift and glass bridge perched atop the mountains that surround town and dwarf the Gatlinburg Space Needle. Not that dwarfing the Gatlinburg Space Needle is an accomplishment—it’s almost overshadowed by a Holiday Inn Express up the street. 

Bill Bryson, in a rare fit of understatement, called Gatlinburg “a shock to the system,” “astoundingly ugly,” and “appalling.” Imagine a bootlegging themed Disneyland and you’ll have a reasonable sense of the Gatlinburg vibe. I have here in front of me the receipt for a single slice of pepperoni pizza, which cost eight U.S. American dollars and ninety three cents. Like Bryson’s two burgers and two sodas for twenty bucks, my whining about this will soon seem quaint and silly. But readers of the future: just take however many euro or bitcoin you think one slice of pizza should cost and multiply that by eight. Outrageous, right?

But how did I get to Gatlinburg? I walked, obviously, but in a larger sense it’s a good question. The last thing I sent you, back in March, was a gear roundup and the news that I was getting back on trail in Virginia and hoping to finish the remaining 865 miles between Waynesboro and Springer Mountain. I fully intended to resume my occasional posting cadence—I even assumed I would have more time and opportunity to write since I’d be hiking mostly alone. It didn’t work out that way for reasons that I’ll get to in a minute but first let me just recap the basic facts of that hike.

I got back on trail with Liz on March 16th at Rockfish Gap and Liz hiked with me for 11 days, to Daleville, VA, in just that short time becoming a certified dirtbag thru hiker. In all fairness, she was already pretty much a dirtbag, but she also got her trail legs quick. 

After Liz departed, I continued south alone through the rest of Virginia, then into Tennessee and along the meandering Tennessee-North Carolina border, which is largely also the route of the Appalachian Trail. On April 29th I reached the town of Hot Springs, NC, where I had been planning to take a day off. But heading into Hot Springs, it became clear that my family needed me back home. I decided to stop at Hot Springs, and I headed back home with 275 miles of trail left, a little less than three weeks at the steady and oddly specific 108 miles a week pace I was making. In all, I hiked 590 miles in 45 days.

And as you may or may not have noticed, I didn’t write a word that whole time. I’m not entirely sure why. Partly I was tired. I averaged a little more than thirteen miles a day overall, and if you take zero days out of that, I was generally doing fifteen to twenty miles every actual hiking day. At the end of that I generally set up my tent, boiled my Knorr packet or freeze dried meal, and collapsed into my quilt to watch one (1) downloaded episode of Below Deck before not so much “falling asleep” as plummeting into a black void of unconsciousness.  

But that’s not the whole story. I did also have days off, and I didn’t write during those either. With some time and perspective, I think the real answer is that I was lonely, and I didn’t handle it well

Everywhere south of about Connecticut, the trail is lined with rhododendrons. Rhododendrons are broad-leaved but also evergreen, which made them the only source of color I saw on trail for March and the first week or so of April, glossy green against the bare gray branches of trees still asleep for the winter. Rhododendrons have a clever trick for surviving cold temperatures. When it gets below freezing their leaves curl up tightly along their long axis, like cigars, to keep the cold from damaging the delicate leaf undersides. When the sunlight warms them again, they relax and unroll. 

As I’m sure you’ve realized by now, the rhododendron is a labored metaphor for me curling up and withdrawing into silence in response to hiking almost entirely alone until I started to hit the northbound hiker bubble, somewhere south of Erwin, Tennessee. I think I was just lonely. 

Looking back I can recall very little of the landscape I walked through after Liz left, but I vividly remember every time I spoke to another person. The guy just past the Refuge hostel near Roan Mountain, who, when I said I hoped the rain would hold off, yelled out “Well we ain’t made of sugar brother!” (He was right, and I’ve remembered it since.) The shuttle driver who was hauling hikers around as a way to get a break while she cared for her husband with advanced Alzheimer’s. Neville, the proprietor of Woods Hole hostel. The three college kids from Massachusetts that I shared the Hurricane Mountain shelter with for one night, and who kept up a steady stream of bits and gags the whole time, making me want to turn around and hike north with them. The sweet desk clerk who gave me a discount at the Relax Inn on a rainy day when I was cold and wet and fed up. The Relax Inn turned out to be the worst motel I’ve ever stayed in, and I lost my driver’s license there, but none of that was her fault. 

That sounds like a random sampling but honestly it’s just about a complete list of the people I spoke to in six weeks. If  the trail always has something to teach you, this section taught me that my lifetime interest in hiking alone has been more than satisfied. If I never do it again, that wouldn’t bother me a bit. 

Fortunately I don’t have to, because Mica has also been back on trail since late August, hiking south from Pearisburg, Va with his boyfriend Christian, who earned himself the trail name Bigfoot, partly by being 6’2”, hirsute, and relentlessly shirtless, and partly by hiking with Mica, whose trail name has been Mothman since back in Maine. I met them in Hot Springs and we’re all heading for Springer Mountain together. 

Postscript: I wrote most of this in Gatlinburg, but it wasn’t quite done by the time we had to get back on trail, and in the meantime we’ve hiked through the rest of the Smokies, across Fontana Dam, and about 15 more miles. So we have just over 150 miles left, and I’m gonna send this before it gets even more outdated. Here’s me and Mica at the 2000 mile marker.