Chapter 4
Hot Springs, North Carolina
270 miles down and 1898 miles to go

Trimpi Shelter Register:

     "Sulu and I went into town where we purchased a glider and are hoping to fly from I-81 to Katahdin.  Strawberry cheesecake shake in Troutdale greatest thing since ziploc bags.   On to camp with fellow bozos.  Flower Power!  Would be nice to see you, girl.  Wrongway, come back to Jamaica, man.  Cheerio All."

Father Time
GA>ME

Pine Swamp Brook Lean-to Register:

     "Attention Thru Hikers!!  The grocery store in town is apparently closed for good.  I did manage to get some fruit (yes!) at the restaurant/bakery.  I also got a quart of milk, a little pizza thing with garlic and parmesan, and a croissant which I ate on this nice bench facing the river and covered bridge.  I also ate some chili & sausage."

Apparatus
GA>ME

     April fourth slipped in like a thief, and Wayah woke not to the sun beaming through the trees, but to rain falling on his face through the dark. Yesterday he had met Fly and Aces lying on top of Max Patch, a huge bald in North Carolina. They were relaxing with their lunch and assorted daydreams, and he had felt compelled to join them. They were a young, trail-worn couple that carried their excitement around like concealed squirt guns. The day had disappeared, talking, hiking and laughing, and they all ended up on top of Bluff Mountain, sleeping on their tarps instead of in tents so they could watch the stars. They were ten miles from Hot Springs, North Carolina and Wayah was still on schedule, earning him a day of rest in town, the first in three weeks.

     The night is a curious prankster. When Wayah opened his eyes after the first few drops hit him, he just lay there, looking at the blackness that had eaten the stars while he slept. He waited for it to stop so he could get back to sleep, but the light rain was picking up if it was changing at all. He closed his eyes and wondered if waking up in a wet sleeping bag that morning would be any worse than having to wake up and pack at whatever godless hour this was. A large drop in his eye woke him from his dilemma.

     "Aces."
     "Unh?" came a strained groan from a few yards off.
     "Aces, it's raining"
     "Unh? Oh, mmm." Wayah recognized the thought process. "Oh, man. Fly, wake up, it's raining. Where's that headlamp? Good God, what time is it?" Wayah saw the crisp snap of Indiglo through the night.
     "It's four."
     Wayah got up quickly and stuffed his sleeping bag in its sack, stowing it under the rain cover of the back pack. It was cold in the dark outside the sleeping bag, and the rain was even colder. He pulled out his rain coat and pants and quickly slid them on over his clothes. He strapped on his head lamp and pulled the hood of the rain coat over it, angling the beam downwards to keep from blinding his friends. A few bits and pieces, the ground cloth, the water bottle and everything was packed. The flurry of concentrated activity tethered to an end, and the three of them stood staring at each other in the night. The rain glittered like cave dust in the crisscrossed paths of the three headlamps. Waterproof, awake, and packed up, they stood quietly staring in a circle. Aces looked contemplatively at the three packs leaning against the trees. He was a tall, thin man, with a face that Wayah knew had to be smiling by now, but behind the headlamp it was hard to see. Fly was short and thin and her hands dug comfortably into her hips as she acknowledged their predicament. The night had them in check. They had to move. So just after four on the fourth day of the fourth month, three tired, wet hikers set off without breakfast to trudge through the dark and rain toward town.

* * *

     Squirrelfight hung between two trees just above the ground, suspended in a hammock and wrapped in a bag with a hole just large enough to allow his mouth and nose some fresh air. This was fine with him. He slept best in the cold air, and though the hammock experience was new, he had been practicing sleeping in this synthetic cocoon for close to a month. Two section hikers that were adding the Smoky Mountains to their list of finished sections of the A.T., had come in and set up the hammock the evening before. When they saw his interest in it, they generously offered it to him for the night, and opted to stay in the shelter. They had left the other hammock to Jones, who, with Squirrelfight and another hiker named Flux, had broken off from the larger group in an attempt to reach Hot Springs early. The hammocks sure were comfortable, and meant they didn't have to set up tents, but now, an hour before dawn, they were getting rained on for the first time in this unusually dry spring and Squirrelfight didn't have the energy or motivation to do anything about it.

     He peeked his eyeball out his air hole and saw Jones roll out of the other hammock and lay himself down in the dry dirt under the overhanging roof just outside the shelter. Not worth the effort, Squirrel decided. He had hiked his first 20 mile day and finished his first 100 mile week to put himself where he was now; hanging between two trees, an easy three miles from town with no food-weight in his pack and a Laundromat dryer just waiting for him and his wet sleeping bag. He was in a good place, and let the rain wet his dry mouth as he fell back to sleep.

     A month earlier, before he had begun his life in the woods, Squirrelfight would have been going to bed just before the sun was rising. It's easy to be a nocturnal human with modern conveniences like electricity and bourbon. This morning, though, like the past 24, dawn was Squirrel's alarm clock and there was no snooze button. The nights are still lengthy in April so going to bed at dark means a good night's sleep for a worn-out hiker. That didn't, however, make it any easier to get out of a toasty-warm bag on a rainy morning, knowing that all he had left for breakfast was that last candy bar in his food bag. He shifted the sleeping bag over his head so that no light could reach his eyes, but the local woodpecker nestled sturdily overhead had decided it was time for breakfast. So the bag was slowly unzipped and the crusty-eyed Squirrelfight emerged into the new day hungry for much more than that one candy bar.

****

     Hot Springs sat nestled among the creases in the mountains below them as Wayah, Fly, and Aces rounded the last bluff. One street wound through the village, but waiting in the tiny buildings below were all the comforts of society and a much needed rest. Down the slope and on the street through town, Fly and Aces stopped at a bed-and-breakfast mentioned in the Thru-hiker's handbook. Wayah went on to the post office to pick up his supplies saying he'd meet them at the inn later. It wasn't quite noon and the sun had come out, baking the street and drying the rain into trails of lingering steam. The smell of wet asphalt with a hint of exhaust drifted over the street as Wayah made his way to the post office to pick up the package his mother had sent with mail and supplies for the next stretch.

     The post office was clean and cold with lots of hard edges and sterile surfaces. Wayah pulled off his pack and leaned it against the wall. It was unusually light-the benefit of being out of food-and the sound of the frame tapping on the hard floor seemed very loud in this silent place. The woods can be called quiet and peaceful, but between the wind, the trees, and the animals, it's rarely silent. The postmaster answered the shiny bell from the recesses of a room filled with shelves and letters and packages. Suddenly in close quarters with a town person, Wayah was bombarded by smells of soap, shampoo and aftershave. The smells were not unpleasant, but they were strikingly unnatural. The postmaster seemed to be having a similar experience being in close quarters with a thru-hiker, but seemed to be more practiced in his reaction. He was kind, and he brought a brown cardboard box to the counter that was addressed to the post office. It had "Please hold for Through-Hiker" written all over it.
     "I'll just need to see your ID," said the postmaster. Wayah reached into a pouch where all of his important cards were tied together with a rubber band. He shuffled through the credit card, insurance card, and phone card, finally reaching the driver's license. Wayah looked at the face and the name on the license for a moment after presenting it. He had a full head of thick hair in the picture, and he looked so clean. So unlike Wayah. With three weeks of growth now, his short, oily hairs were pressed flat under his cap and what little facial hair he had was beginning to curl. His skin was already beginning to look worn by sun and oil and sweat. After signing in briefly at the post office's hiker register, he made his way back out into the air and across the road to the bed-and-breakfast to get a room and take the rest of the day off .

     The inn had been the refuge of many hikers through the years. The cost was very low for hikers and the place was made to be comfortable. It was like being welcomed into someone's home instead of paying for lodgings. Wayah climbed up the creaky wooden stairs to a room he would share with another thru-hiker named Kaptain Krummholz, who wasn't around. Wayah proceeded to uncurl the tightness and ache from his body and opened the box he had gotten in the mail. Inside were ziploc bags full of food, letters, and some replacement clothing. It had probably been packed very neatly, but the voyage had tossed it into a pleasantly chaotic collage of comfort. Wayah rummaged through the food first. It didn't look like enough. When he had started the trail three weeks earlier, the food space in his pack held enough for nine or ten days, but somewhere in the Smokies he had been overrun by an incredible hunger and had begun eating nearly twice as much food. He had to stop off and buy some poorly aged gas station food a couple days earlier just to keep from going hungry. He couldn't imagine the food in front of him being adequate. His next stop in Elk Park was eight days away, and his stomach groaned as he looked at the box. Four packs of oatmeal, four packs of toaster pastries, eight packs of hot chocolate, 26 candy bars, a jar of peanut butter, a pound of summer sausage, a block of cheese, a large bag of gorp (which stands for "Good Ol' Raisins and Peanuts," but more commonly takes the form of nuts, granola, chocolate, raisins, and anything else one decides to mix in), six Lipton noodle dinners, and two bags of rice and spices. There was no way. Before he had started hiking it had looked like so much food, but now it looked to last five or six days at best. Ooo! There was a bag full of gummi critters near the bottom. He picked them out and began to chew on them while he opened his letters. The gummis were too heavy to carry considering what poor fuel they were, but they would do nicely as a treat to keep him alive until dinner.

     Beginning to feel very comfortable here, he leaned back in a chair, to read his mail with the sun through the old window. There was a desk with books and pictures on it, and knowing that this was his room, they felt like his things. There was a comfort that came from feeling like the master of his environment again, and he realized again how isolated he had been. The pain in his body was falling gently away. His eyes caught a long, thin map on the wall of the Eastern seaboard. It had "Appalachian Trail" written across the top and a thick red line zigzagging its way down the middle. Wayah dropped the letters back in the box, glanced at the lower half of the map and found himself looking at Virginia, further down was North Carolina, and at the bottom of North Carolina was Hot Springs.
     "You're kidding me," he said aloud, thinking of the 270 miles he had hiked and looking at the tiny tail of trail behind him on the map and the great dragon before him. His feet began to ache.

****

     There are different criteria, depending on who you talk to, that determine a restaurant's greatness. Squirrelfight's rule was quite simple but very specific: could he get a chocolate shake at breakfast? When a hiker has been on the trail for several days with only the food on his back, a normal restaurant meal will not satisfy his appetite. So even though the eggs, bacon, toast, hash browns, and orange juice may have filled another customer, it was when the waitress arrived with that big chocolate shake that Squirrelfight knew he would survive until lunch.

     Jones, Jokers Wild and Flux were also doing their part to frighten the local waitresses as they sat crunched in the tiny booth with plates and glasses piled in a dripping pyramid at the center. The four of them had been hiking together since entering the Smoky Mountains. Flux was a flip-flopper. He had begun the trail the previous summer in the North hiking Southbound, reached the halfway point, and run out of money. Now he was finishing the trail starting in the south with enough time left to finish hiking the Southern half of the trail before the anniversary of his first start (the definition of a thru-hiker). He had hiked about 1,000 miles more than anyone else at the table. Jokers Wild had yellow blazed into town the day before when a local had offered him a ride, and was waiting for them by the diner when they arrived. Yellow blazing is a term for hitch-hiking over trail miles, so called for the yellow lines on the road. White blazing means taking the trail, and blue blazing means taking one of the blue blazed side trails that sometimes provide alternate routes to the A.T.. Even hikers who were not staunchly against yellow blazing had a hard time arriving at camp with someone who had hiked much less, but ended up in the same place. It felt the same as drivers who will skip a long line of cars to merge in at the front, but Jokers was good natured about it, and they didn't care all that much whether he was missing a few miles in his hike.

     Squirrelfight pushed his plate into the dripping pile and leaned back with the satisfied, slightly painful feeling of an overfull belly. He had arranged to work off his stay at the inn, wanting to avoid spending money wherever possible, and needed to head back soon to find out what his job would be. They all looked at each other, faces a little red, breathing a little short, and grinned with contentment.
     "Is everybody ready for ice cream?" said Jones, "The Trail Guide says there's Ben & Jerry's at Ramsey's Store... and beer." Jones had received his name from Flux a few weeks earlier in Georgia for his intense and constant cravings for unavailable vices, and through the dry counties of the deep South, his fellow hikers had heard a lot about how much he would like a beer or twelve.

     After a pint of New York Super Fudge Chunk and his first beer of the trail, Squirrelfight made his way back to the inn where the innkeeper put him to work scraping and piling bricks for the afternoon and working up a new appetite.

****

     Wayah had been overjoyed to discover the music room downstairs. Now, showered and enjoying the feeling of the cotton town shirt and boxers that he carried in a Ziploc bag for clean occasions, he limped down to play the guitar for the first time in three weeks. Walking barefoot was very difficult. It felt like the bones in his feet were broken or bruised, and he was losing the feeling in the tips of his toes, but it was so nice to walk on the cold, clean wood without his suffocating boots that he decided to bear the discomfort. He also hoped the day's rest might give his feet enough time to heal, but actually it would be seven months before he would be able to walk barefoot without limping or to feel any of his toes.

     Sitting and playing the guitar was euphoric. The old, cluttered living room with its high ceiling and huge windows was shady and cool, and the lacy curtains caught reflections of the sleepy country light through the open shutter. Wayah could smell the familiar spring air outside, and the light, evocative smell of baking bread from inside. Other instruments, leaning in corners and tucked behind furniture, listened quietly while Wayah strummed and sang, his eyes closed and smiling.

     "Is that 'Blackbird'? Good tuuune," came a weary voice. Wayah had learned the Beatles song shortly before starting the trail, and was picking it out slowly. He looked up and saw someone he could tell was a hiker. He was dressed in white cotton slacks and a sweater, but his limp and obviously tired body gave him away. "What's up? I'm Jooones." He drew out the "o" to perch on his lips with a slight surfer accent. It was still a little awkward, introducing themselves to people by their trail names.

     "I'm Wayah" he rested his arms on top of the guitar. "I passed you guys three days ago in Davenport Gap. It was dark and the shelter was full, so I had to keep going after I ate supper. You must've passed me the next morning before I got up."
     "Bummer, man. Yeah, me and Squirrel and Flux shot outta there pre-dawn so we could get close enough yesterday to get in here for breakfast this morning. Keep jammin'." Jones sat down in the heavy chair next to the couch where Wayah was sitting. "Ohh, it feels good to be off these feet." Wayah went back to playing, and now and then Jones would chime in. Their weary happiness was genuine.

     It was approaching supper time, and the smell of rich foods was now pouring from the kitchen, making their stomachs roll. They were joined by others, also coming down to wait for their supper. Fly and Aces came in with Squirrelfight, who had started the trail with them. He was perhaps the scruffiest person Wayah had yet seen, though he had seen him at Davenport gap that night in the dark also. Squirrel had a curly beard and long thick frayed braids of hair that stuck out like a mop. Flux, Cain, and Snow Leopard also came in, and soon everyone had picked up an instrument or made a drum out of some furniture or gear, and the group of them played and laughed and sang. Fly found a hat rack in an adjoining room covered with strange hats and masks, and brought one out for each of them. They all fell together easily, talking, joking, and playing. They had everything in common with each other, and nothing in common with anyone else. The world before the trail was becoming a series of irrelevant details, but the shelters they had passed, the people they had met, the mountains they has shared, those were the details that made up the life they knew. Wayah couldn't believe how happy he was. He had been holding a quiet loneliness inside that had been growing in the past weeks. It melted away as darkness fell and damp, antiquated lamps flooded the parlor. In it's wake he waded in a warm sea of friendship, unified towards a single purpose. Dinner.

     It was a work of art, sculpted with thru-hikers in mind. Bottomless dishes were full of the fresh vegetables the hikers had been missing, and the tastes and textures were of a royal, authentic sort, extraordinary even off the trail. Wayah sat at the end of the table by Jones and Squirrelfight, prodding Jones with stories and jokes, enjoying his laughter. Squirrel was eating fiercely and smiling, but not hearing all of the joking over the grinding of his jowls. They met other hikers that night including the mysterious Kaptain Krummholz, though some time would pass before they would hike with him and come to know him well. The hikers had passed the point of being full long before and continued piling the delicacies onto their plates and measuring them into their mouths as space presented itself. Jones was having trouble laughing and couldn't even drink the beer he had bought for after dinner. But he couldn't have been happier. Their stomachs stuffed with warm, good food, the hikers finally pulled themselves from the table and dragged off into lit rooms to talk and laugh into the night. They shared stories of fright, luck, embarrassment, and mischief. Only a couple had seen any bears yet, and they were envied. A few told stories of short friends who had recently called it quits. These stories were solemn, because those that left were not so different from the hikers in the room, and their struggles were familiar.

     These hikers were not like the ones Wayah had met during those first days on the trail. They each had a month and 270 miles of trail behind them now, and their lives were only subtle variants on his. They had seen the same trails, felt the same rain, knew the woods as their homes, and were learning, as he was, how simple the joys of life really are. Wayah wanted to keep laughing, to keep sharing stories, to keep being understood. He decided that he had had enough of being alone for a while, and these men were the best company he could imagine.