I awoke on March 25^th very disoriented. One by one I began to notice little things that weren’t quite right. My bed was harder than usual, my pillow unyielding. There was a pale, ghostly fabric looming only a foot or so from my head. I became aware of a spoiled, oddly familiar smell hanging in the air all around me. Recognition began to invade, and soon after, like a spray of cold water, understanding. I was in my tent, not my bed. I was in the woods, not my house, and this had been happening a lot lately. This was to be my tenth day hiking the Appalachian Trail, and my fifth day of being alone.

     I stared at the roof of the cocoon-like tent for a while, watching sunlight patterning on the thin, stretched nylon. The mountain dawn is a bright, crisp white since the sun has been rising a while before it comes over the ridge. I heard the conversant spring a few yards away, and listened to the loud absence of walls around me. During the night my heavy bones had slowly settled into each other and forgotten where they began and ended. When I moved, I did so carefully, mindful of my weary feet and legs and back. I had grown used to the fact that, though I ached to the point of stinging before going to bed, the night would leave only soreness in it’s wake, and most of that was dampened within the first hour of walking the next day. Nevertheless, I always wondered if my body would eventually wear down and break, and I tried to imagine how I would be able to tell that pain from the daily aches of eight or nine hours of hiking. Despite the pains and the growing loneliness though, I was still focused. On what, was hard to say. An air of pleasurable weariness hung round my head and occupied those parts of my mind that might have questioned the way I was spending my days.

     My sleeping bag came off reluctantly, but once out of it, I wasted no time in leaving the tent. The little one-and-a-half-man tent was too small for me to even sit up straight in and barely afforded room to get into my shorts and heavy fleece pullover. I crunched my knees to my chest, turned my feet to the door, and unzipped the mesh entrance. My big, black, very new boots were half under the tiny vestibule of the tent, just deeply enough that if it rained the water couldn't get to the foot hole to fill them up. The toes were covered with beads of moisture where they stuck out under the flap. Before the Trail I had only hiked 22 miles in them. One overnight hike. Of course the same was true for the rest of my gear, and for myself. Even so, my feet slid easily into the boots and dropped into the snug socket around the heel. I laced them up soundly but lightly, not wanting to strangle my ankles. My feet felt solid and steady in the mountain boots. They still smelled like leather, and once laced up, I would no longer smell the reek from my socks. I had three pairs, but three days of constant hiking on each pair had left them all pretty ripe. A few days earlier I had tried to wash them with liquid soap on a frosty afternoon in a high mountain stream. I fairly quickly decided that the smell of my socks was a small price compared to the biting pain that my hands found in that icy water. When in the morning the socks were still filled with ice, I was further fortified in my decision that the stink was a better friend than the cold and let the socks smell how they wanted after that.

     I brushed the dirt and moisture off the inside of the rain fly that covered my tent's vestibule and pushed past it into the frigid mountain air. The act of leaving the tent is one of the great rewards of camping. No world is more confined than that of the tent, and none more open than the space just in front of it. It's like being born every morning. The warm, soft, smelly shell in all its layers is pulled off, and you stretch out to more than twice its height. You let your bones separate and the crystal talons of the morning air invade your every pore as you breathe in the pure, high mountain air and realize that the whole world starts beneath your feet and extends down and away forever. For that moment before you breathe out, you, too, extend through the brook and the earth and the trail, beyond the trees and the horizon and the sky. For that moment you have no bounds and no limits, and there's nothing you cannot do. The countdown then begins for you to find a suitable spot to dig a toilet hole.

     After filling in my ditch and putting away my trowel, I settled down on a log near a blackened old fire pit and cooked up a small pot of water on my little camp stove for tea and oatmeal. The oatmeal was routine by this time, but the tea was my first on the trail. I felt very cosmopolitan with the tag hanging out of my flimsy, plastic camp cup, and the hot tea nestled very comfortably between my hands. I thought I must have looked like a picture in one of those camping magazines, except dirtier and with no hair. I felt the steam flow past my face as I looked out off Wine Spring Mountain. I had made my camp at the very top of the small, desolate mountain, and the view into the valleys beyond was mostly cluttered by the gray-brown skeletons of trees and the green clumping of rhododendron around the spring. It hadn't taken long to get used to staring past those gray, southern trees, watching the valleys and the hills and wondering where the Trail would lead each day. My body was almost getting used to the abuse of hiking with the 60 pound pack all day, and though climbing mountains would never become really easy, I was beginning to feel the world around me instead of only feeling my legs and feet and shoulders and the pounding of my heart.

     I had been hiking alone for five days and hadn’t seen a soul for three. I crossed into North Carolina from Georgia with Bob the Postman, but he had gotten ahead of me that day, and I never saw him again. Even though I grew up as an only child with two working parents, I was used to having people around for some part of the day. The solitude was beginning to reach me on a very personal level. The laughter, posturing, aches, and general camaraderie of the hikers I had met the first few days had been curious, but welcome. It felt like we were all in the classroom without a teacher and no one knew quite how to act. We just watched each other having our personal problems with feet and gear and attitude, and wondered who would make it all the way, and who would limp off to town at the next road crossing. One man hurt his knee the first day and decided to stay behind in the shelter the next. One woman was starting to lose toenails the third day. One girl had a dog and it wasn’t adjusting well to the chaffing from its little dog-pack. Our packs were heavy, our days were hard, and the task ahead was Olympian. I had virtually no idea what I was doing. I spent a lot of time watching other hikers and trying to pick up useful tips from them, but the experience seemed to have even the two eagle scouts among us fumbling for some source of confidence. On the second day I lost most of my nylon cord while trying to hang my food out of reach of bears as I had seen in drawings. The knotted system of branches and cord that I improvised proved to be not only bear proof, but hiker proof. I spent the first part of the morning jumping in the air with my knife and whacking at the only part of the cord that was in reach where I had tethered it around a tree trunk. As far as I know, the rest of that cord is still up there, prompting hikers to wonder what alien intelligence managed to bind two trees together at such a height.

     There was one guy who was pretty relaxed about the whole thing. His trail name was Sir Renity, and I met him on the way up Springer Mountain the first day. Most everyone I met already had a trail name that they had chosen before starting. I had read about these names that hikers go by on the trail but hadn't thought of anything fitting for myself. Trail names were easier to remember than people's real names, and often had some sort of story behind them that said something about the hiker. Sir Renity ate fancy food and carried fresh eggs and all sorts of cooking toys with him. I would often pass him during the day, napping on a hillside or reading by a cliff. I suppose I was too caught up in trying to hike at the time to notice that he was having a bit more fun than the rest of us in spite of his heavy pack and blisters. He had gone to town five days ago with everyone else I had met to re-supply and enjoy a hostel, but I had to keep going on, now alone. I was hiking long days to catch up to the schedule I had set for my resupply points and not run out of food in between them. Since the boxes of food were mailed to those towns on particular days, it seemed like a tempo that couldn't be toyed with. Sitting there on a log holding an empty teacup wasn't getting me to Katahdin any faster either. I had to start breaking camp and getting my body moving.

     I suddenly realized that a used tea bag weighs a great deal more than a new one, and if deposited in my zip-lock trash bag with my regular trash, would make quite a mess when crammed among my tightly packed gear. I pulled the dripping, mottled sack out of my cup and went over to the fire pit to deposit it under the half-burnt logs where it could be consumed in the next fire. My idea no longer seemed clever when I found dozens of bits of food and trash strewn through the pit. Thinking perhaps to squeeze the juice out of the bag so that it would be lighter and less messy when I put it in my trash, I placed it on a large rock by the pit, and used another rock to flatten it. When I opened the press, though, I found the tea bag had been reduced to wet, flattened, torn mess of herbs and paper marinated in an inky, brown juice. I hesitantly picked up the now very light and empty paper tatters by the string and placed them in my trash bag, kicking the mess of herbs into the dirt. I pulled the green cap out of my pack and secured it to the oily, two-week-old stubble on my head. I had shaved my head a few days before starting, and now my big, pale scalp would grab on to any fabric that passed near it. I had never been bald before, but it seemed somehow fitting, and I had done it myself with an electric moustache trimmer one night during a moment of courageous romanticism. The trimmer wasn't hefty like clippers, and a courageous moment turned into hours of etching my hairline slowly backwards, far past the point of no return.

     I was already getting used to packing up my gear, and it went rather quickly. Break down my bedding and tent and secure them on the pack after shaking out and brushing off dirt and moisture and putting them in their respective sacks. Arrange the stove, pots, and food in the main pouch and I was ready. I pushed aside my journal and pulled out the maps and my data book. I already knew I was seven miles behind schedule. The night before I had decided that I needed to stop on top of Wine Spring Mountain where there was a spring because there was no way I was going to make it to the shelter that day. To catch up to my schedule I would have to do 19 miles to Wesser, North Carolina, a little rafting outpost by a state road. There were supposed to be a restaurant and bunks there. I unfolded the map and followed the zigzagging line of the profile display to find where I was. I rarely even looked at the directional map. All that mattered were the changes in altitude. The up and down didn't look so bad, but 19 miles would be daunting even if it was flat. I had done 19 six days ago when I hiked with Bob the Postman and it had damn near killed me.

     Among the many benefits of sleeping on top of a mountain is beginning the day with a nice, cool downhill to get the blood flowing. A tough uphill at the wrong time could put a stop to all productive thought, but an easy morning stroll into a sleepy, mist laced valley always got my mind working. In the five days I had been alone, I had plenty of time to think. A few days earlier I tried to think of every house I'd lived in, then everyone I had ever known, and since that only took a couple of hours I went on to try to remember everything that had ever happened to me. Now that that was all sorted out, I was down to just keeping my brain wheels moving. A young person can only reflect for so long before redundancy sets in. I decided to sing "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" as it was a long song, and would carry me quite a ways.

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