"Bad Medicine"

by Dom B.
2001.09.06

I backpacked forty miles in four days over the Labor Day weekend, over part of the Appalachian trail near Carlisle, PA. Here's some impressions, some stories, and some other ramblings describing what happened. This is my second try at writing this article, so pray that I got it right this time.

On the first day we left Boiling Springs, PA and hiked a mile to find the trail. I'm lugging fifty pounds of all the food, water, clothing, shelter, and medication I'll need for the next few days, plus some extra. I've never gone backpacking, never even gone camping - serious, backwoods camping, not that 'car camping' crap. My back is killing me, I'm sweating, my boots aren't nearly as broken in as they needed to be. We're heading through the cornfields, I'm praying for the cool, shaded forest to escape the heat of direct sun on blacktop roads.

On the trail we head uphill, my eyes on the path ahead of me to keep from tripping over rocks. Eventually it becomes quiet, no one has the energy to talk nor any bullshit to speak. Eventually your ears become a second pair of eyes, telling you what's in the forest around you. A stream, other hikers, even boulders have their sounds, and you can pick out each one over the cadence of your footsteps and the swish and gurgle of the water you're carrying and the creaks of your nylon pack. Time moves differently. If I ignore my watch, I could walk for nearly an hour and think it was a minute.

Sometimes, the minutes lasted hours. Eventually the pain in my back and the pain in my feet become very distant. Through the days of the hike, the worst times of pain were the first five minutes of walking after break. Eventually your mind is elsewhere, and those appendages and that pain and that body belongs to someone else, or it's just a walking meat machine. I can't really tell you everything I thought of during those quiet interludes. Sometimes food, sometimes water or things going on at home, sometimes sex, but often just nothing, or my thoughts just meandered and didn't rest for too long on any one subject.

The reverie was broken on the first day with the thunder and the storms. A wet hiker is definitely not a happy one. I didn't mind get rained on until my feet got wet. Hiking uphill, with water flowing down the trail like a small stream, deaf from thunder and the relentless staccato of the raindrops, you just keep walking, or you stop and argue about heading to the next shelter or pitching tent right there. Eventually the rain slowed, and we headed on to the shelter, getting a little lost in the dark. In the shelter, nothing more than a shed with one side open to the world, sleeping on a wooden platform in the driest of the damp clothes, I woke every half hour to strange dreams and visions. Shapes in the dark night that were animals that became people that faded into nothing, dreams that lingered into reality when I'd wake and swing at some half-imagined image I saw or thought I saw rummaging through my pack. Morning limps in around 6 am, and we're cold, wet, and not very rested.

Six or seven miles and four or five hours into the second day, we reach the halfway point of the entire Appalachian Trail near Pine Grove Furnace state park. "1,069 miles to Maine and 1,069 miles to Georgia" the marker says. I take a picture. Solitary hikers we had met earlier on the trail told us about a state park and a concession stand near here. We'd talk to them about where the next shelter was, where the next source of water was, how the terrain was up ahead. Every answer seemed to be "four or five miles" and "rocky up ahead". Springs were often dried up. The solitary hikers never talked for long. We came to the park, limped half-blind in the sunlight over to the picnic benches. We were actually a spectacle to the people going to the lake or playing Frisbee or riding mountain bikes; dirty, wet, stinking, and ravenously hungry. We spread our wet clothes on the grass and ordered greasy hamburgers, greasy fries, ice cream, pop, and gorged ourselves. We spent over an hour drying our things and just sitting around, feeling the throbbing in our feet and the stiffness in our joints setting in.

On again after resting in the park, the going was slow because our stomachs were over-full. It was odd being around other people, even though they were nice and would often ask you about where you were coming from and where you were going and how long you had been hiking. I felt like they were just going around in circles and we were headed in a straight line to the destination, that we had some higher purpose. The rest of the day was mostly uphill, but the path was softer here and slightly sandy. Around six PM we stop at a cabin to ask if we can camp nearby. We're told that there's no camping until the next shelter, which is nearly five miles away. So we hike a mile down the trail, which follows a dirt road, and then strike off into the brush to look for a place to pitch the tent. We hastily make dinner before it gets too dark to see, freeze dried foodstuffs that turn into hot meals when you add boiling water, and then you eat right out of the bag your dinner was packaged in. I was eating these camp dinners, along with pita bread and power bars for two days now and I could still taste the hamburger and fries from earlier.

We left the rain cover off the tent, and the mesh of the tent ceiling was transparent. I slept on my back, and woke many times in the night and stared up at the mottled patterns of trees and cloudy night sky, and listened to the frogs and cicadas and heard the wind stir the trees, first on my left, then on my right. I'd stretch my hearing as far as it would go and listen for bears or raccoons but heard none. It became cold that night, and I woke alert the next morning, we ate our breakfast of power bars and beef jerky and headed back down the trail. At midmorning we reached the shelters we were told about the night before, growing crowded with weekend campers whom had hiked in from the nearby road. The rest of the day was easy, a brisk hike with few hills on soft ground through pine forests. We reached the next shelter in the afternoon after a steep downhill hike through head-sized rocks that made my ankles scream and my toes burn.

We only had three miles to our finishing point, but this was a vacation and I didn't want to go home early. Later on, three thru-hikers showed up. Thru-hikers are the amazing ones on the trail, they hike the entire distance, from Maine to Georgia, relying on mail drops of supplies sent ahead to towns on the trail and supply runs to the local supermarket or outfitter to keep them going. The three we met started in Maine in June, and were hoping to finish up in Georgia in November. Five months. Most people who hike the trail pick a 'trail name', and their names were Grimace, Pinball, and Wrong Way. Grimace and Pinball were married, and about 26. Pinball was a personal trainer, and she had taken a five month leave of absence from work. Grimace worked in sales at a failing dot-com and had quit. Wrong Way was just out of high school and was hiking alone until he met Grimace and Pinball and started staying with them. They were all probably the most interesting thing about the trip. They averaged twenty miles a day (that's a ton, we were moving real fast and only managed about 10-12 miles a day), they were fueled mainly on Snickers bars and Pop Tarts, and they were funny. I envied them, they didn't have to go back to work in two days, and aching feet had become second nature for them. I would like to say that their eyes glowed and they were peaceful as Buddha, but I don't know if I can say that for certain.

I came out of this trip with so many questions. I wanted to ask the thru-hikers how they could go back into society after spending five months avoiding a large part of it. I wondered, how long and how far do you have to walk before premature enlightenment? Or is this all just a matter of the craving we have for momentum, momentum in our lives, and physical momentum. Just another rush for an uncertain future, chasing after ghosts and pipe dreams. I've looked over what I've written so far, and yeah, of course I've made it seem more magical than it was. It was a great time, but you were wiped out at the end of the day, and my knees are still killing me and I still don't have feeling in one of my toes. But still, one more thing. Going into work the past few days, surrounded by people, I knew that in the woods I had felt an amazing peace, and it was good.