- Miles 807.3-824.2 (16.9 mi.)
- Ascent: 4285’; descent: 2146’
I wrote yesterday about the perils of social life on the trail. Today, I erred in the opposite direction.
Relatively late in the day, around 13 miles, we took a breather at a trailside site with a large sitting rock. Two minutes after we de-packed, an older gentleman strode up.
We made small talk at first, until he said he was a four-time AT thru-hiker, making him a member of a very small club. He did it twice on grants from the U.S. Forest Service to, as a former professor of botany, collect and document active and invasive plants. He taught, in fact, at MU in Columbia, and is now retired in Lake Stockton, Missouri. The professor’s farm at Stockton Lake is self-sustaining with on-site wind turbines and cisterns.
Every hiker’s pipe dream, this man actually had, down to the goats and vegetable garden.
Clearly, this man and I had a conversation. I don’t mean to say otherwise, or that I wasn’t genuinely interested in the conversation. But I should have picked this professor’s brain in a way I didn’t. I should have been a little less worried about the miles Rachel and I had left in the day.
It wasn’t rude, basically. But it was a missed opportunity.
For a long time afterward I felt guilty. I let it go because there will be many more equally fascinating people ahead, and after all, it was a deeper interaction than one gets with most people on the trail.
The two other moments of note happened earlier in the day. The first, near the very beginning: upon leaving our large, otherwise empty creekside site, we started to see old stone ruins. A chimney here, a foundation wall there, hidden under brush but there.
It turns out, a sign told us, that we were seeing the remnants of a community of freed slaves, sharecroppers who grew the three sisters and tobacco until the 1920s, when the Forest Service “bought” their land. What a pretty bowl, bisected by a rushing creek, it would have been to live in. It would have been hard but possible to live there without indoor plumbing or electricity.
The other point of commentary came halfway up our Big Bald (which is not, in fact, bald) climb: trail magic. A woman named Clay, who plans to hike SOBO from Katahdin starting mid-June, was handing out apples, muffins, chips, cookies, and Gatorade from her Corolla. We stood there with her and her friend, who’d agreed to drive Clay, and talked “wish I had knowns” until Mowgli arrived. Mowgli is a scrawny 22-year-old who wears a do-rag and a short mustache, who we’ve now leapfrogged a few times.
The cool thing about meeting Clay is that we will likely actually see her on the trail, perhaps around Vermont. Clay admitted she had a little more training to do, but seemed ecstatic to be thru-hiking after working at Walmart for the past couple of years.
Tomorrow will be a short day in terms of mileage–13.1–but long in terms of pain. We will do our first continuous 3,000-foot descent, starting at a feature called The Priest. We aren’t sure what it looks like, but we will confer over cheese and crackers. Our campsite is about as low as it gets on the AT, around 900 feet.
Tonight, our neighbors are a middle school English teacher and a high school Spanish teacher who met at a women’s outdoor club. This is their first backpacking trip, and they’re having the usual reactions: a strange and ever-rotating mix of tired, excited, sore, happy, eager, and afraid of tomorrow. I hope they decide it’s as grand as we and the four-time thru-hiker think it is.
