This Is Gross

Let me start off by saying this: I’m on a bus right now, wearing cotton everything, and it feels AMAZING.  Better yet, the people on the bus surrounding me as I type this don’t realize how lucky they are: less than 24 hours ago I hadn’t showered or done laundry in 8 days.  My parents, when they met me four days into my ‘no showering for eight days’ streak said that I “smelled a little bit musty” but that it wasn’t a problem.  When I met my sisters on top of Killington on Wednesday, night, however, they were a little bit more honest, and told me that I stunk.  (At one point Ivy forgot how nasty I was and gave me a pat on the head, and instantly regretted touching me.  HA!)  Logically, I understand that I’ve been smelling a bit rank, but it’s complicated by the fact that most of the time (i.e.: when I’m dirty), I can’t smell myself or other thru-hikers.  Day hikers, however, I can smell, and when they walk by me on the trail I often stop, deeply inhale, and contemplate following them wherever they’re going because they smell SO DAMN GOOD.  (I imagine that politeness keeps them from retching when I walk by, although by now they probably know enough to hold their breath when a thru-hiker approaches.) 

Back in Pearisburg (that horrible black hole of a town in Virginia), I was running errands with some thru-hikers and a hostel owner.  Once we had dropped off the trash at the transfer station and were headed to the grocery store, a particularly foul odor filled the car.  Having just offloaded the trash, we assumed that it was leakage from one of the trash bags.  As the journey progressed, however, we realized that it wasn’t leakage; it was Ruffles’s shirt, which hadn’t been washed in quite some time.  If I hadn’t spent the previous night at the hostel, and if I wasn’t wearing clean clothing, I don’t think I would have noticed.

Eight days is the longest I’ve gone without taking a shower, and this last stretch was only the second time I’ve done it (and honestly, I hope to never do it again).  The first time was my first 8 days on the trail, when I was traveling approximately 10 to 12 miles per day in temperatures that hovered around 60 degrees.  Recently I’ve been traveling between 18 to 22 miles per day, in much higher temperatures, so I’m sure you can imagine the olfactory difference.  (Or maybe, just maybe, you don’t want to imagine it.  That’s fine, too.)

I’ve been sweating a lot these days, especially during the last heat wave.  I left Connecticut and traveled into Massachusetts during the worst of the heat and humidity, and during that time was consuming between 5 and 7 liters of water per day (and was traveling approximately 20 miles per day to make it to my pickup location at the right time and place).  When I got my friends Cynthia and Kevin’s house, I had to scrub their tub after showering, because it looked like this:

Note: Their tub was perfectly clean before I got in.

There are many things that people get out of hiking the Appalachian Trail.  Some folks gain a better understanding of who they are, and where they’re going with their life. Others find that their world view shifts drastically from spending six months living out of a backpack.  And then there are those people who learn to love the simplicity that comes along with having the most difficult decision of the day being what to eat for lunch.  As for me, I’m getting all of the above out of this experience, along with this: there are few things better than putting on clean clothing after your first shower in eight days.