Moody Musings
Shaw's has a great breakfast. It's pancakes, eggs, bacon, and potatoes, and they have a very nice system where you sit down, and they bring you your food and coffee and everything, and it's great. [Wife note: It’s so great that actual photos don’t do it justice! So you know what that means.] It's another good time to socialize, too. So, this is the morning of the 12th, by the way.
[WN: So many questions. Is that a raw egg yolk on the pancakes?]
I know I mentioned Sundial and FIIK at one point recently. They’re long section hikers, and they're finishing up the Appalachian Trail after a couple of years of section hiking it. I'd guess they're probably in their late 50s or early 60s. And they were getting very stressed out trying to figure out the logistics of staying at Baxter State Park, which really is kind of a confusing process, but I don't need to go into great detail about it here. At any rate, S. reserved a tent spot at the Katahdin Stream campground, which is where we’re going to stay the night of the 19th. And the campsite can accommodate six people, so I offered two of the slots to Sundial and FIIK, and they were just overjoyed about that. So that's great.
After breakfast, I organized all my food for the upcoming week into two parts — one half will go into the bucket for my food drop, and the other half will be coming with me in my pack for the first three and a half days. So I feel pretty good about that. I also got myself a new water filter for this final leg. Mine had gotten so slow. I tried to clean it at the Maine Roadhouse, but it only helped a little. And having clean water is kind of important, so I don’t want to take any unnecessary chances with that.
Several people I know are buying new shoes at this point. I had a small blow out on one of mine. The Whites are not nice to shoes. I think I'll be fine, but I was considering getting a new pair and checked out what was available in the resupply. Ultimately, I decided against it. I think mine will hold out for the next 100 or so miles. Also, I checked the hiker box and found three pairs of shoe inserts. One of those should be enough to fix me up! I just have to figure out which pair fits my shoes best.
It's about noon now, and as soon I've done this recording, I’ll finish getting organized and pack up my bag, and then I’ll just kind of hang out and enjoy the other hikers’ company for the rest of the day.
[Part 2, recorded later in the day]
So I'm trying to figure out how best to express this, because it's not really something that happened today. It's just sort of the mood around the hiker hostel. A lot of the talk this afternoon was split between logistics — sort of What is the plan to get to Baxter State Park? And What’s the best route? Because the first part is a lot more mountainous than the second part. — and reconciling that we're all on the last leg of this big hike.
We still have more than 100 miles to go, of course, but this is really the final stop. And people are starting to come to terms with that. Like, what are we doing afterward in the immediate future? And in the longer-term future? So it's been an interesting afternoon. Some hikers are exchanging contact information and making plans to reconnect afterward, and others are recognizing or accepting that these relationships just exist on the trail and probably won't extend beyond that, and that's okay.
I've been chatting with different people all day and trying myself to wrap my head around the fact that in about a week, I'll get to be reunited with S., which is the most important thing, and secondly, I'll be on top of Mount Katahdin and at the official endpoint of the AT. And it’ll be the culmination of something I've been thinking about doing for a really, really long time.
It's one of those things that feels like it took forever to get here, and then all of a sudden, it's here, and it’s over. I think a lot of things in life are like that. I'm actually feeling a little nervous about how the next six days are going to go.
I've got to cover 100 miles in six days. I mean, I've done it before. But this is pretty remote stuff, and the 100 Mile Wilderness just brings its own set of challenges. The terrain's a little bit different. And there just aren't a lot of options if anything should go wrong. The good news is that a lot of us will be out there at the same time, and everyone at this point has developed a sense of camaraderie and is willing to help each other out. So from that standpoint, I guess I'm not terribly worried.
But it's an interesting feeling right now. It feels a little bit like the eve of graduation. Granted, it’s going to be a 100-mile-long graduation, but everyone is sort of reacting in their own way for their own unique reasons.
There are also a lot of section hikers here who are gearing up to finish their final section. For many of them, it's been a multi-year process to complete the AT. I'm not really describing it very well. There's just an interesting mood here. Lots of contemplating and fluctuating emotions and all that.
We'll see how the evening progresses, because I think there will be plenty of people here tonight who will want to kind of postpone the inevitable of getting on the trail tomorrow morning. We could certainly have some late-night folks dragging things out a bit. But anyway, it's just been an interesting day. The mood has been completely different than any other time I've spent at a hostel. The final push begins tomorrow. We'll see how it all goes.
