Saudade

As my AT adventure is starting to slowly wind down (Less than 400 miles left? Where did the time go? Just yesterday I was slogging my ass through Virginia with a TERRIBLE haircut), I've been thinking a lot lately about my best and worst moments on the trail.  I'm not going to write about those right now, however, as I've still got another 400 or so miles to go, which will hopefully be filled with the sorts of moments that make my heart sing and with none of the ones that will make me cringe later in life (for reference: see old photos of my shaved head).

Instead, I'm going to tell you about the only day on the trail when I wanted to go home.  Before I got down to Georgia, a couple of thru-hikers had told me that at some point, everyone wants to quit.  Their advice for when that day arrived was this: quit tomorrow.  But on the day I wanted to go home, it wasn't because I wanted to quit, but because I felt devastatingly alone and as if I was missing out on one of the biggest moments of my life.

On the day I wanted to go home, I called my sister at a predetermined time, and she casually left her cell phone on the dining room table as she and Seth handed my mom and Seth's mom mother's day cards.  I listened as they opened their cards and read the inscription "We hope you like your gift, because we're not returning it."  Ivy had already told me that they had put a small photo showing a small black object shaped like a peanut floating in a pool of hazy greyness inside the card.  I'd known about the object since Hogback Ridge Shelter, in Tennessee, and when they had told me on that night I was going to be an aunt I had yelled out loud with joy.  (They then told me that I couldn't break the news to ANYONE, and consequently I couldn't explain to my thru-hiking friends why I was yelling in the middle of the woods at night.) The moment at which both my mother and Seth's mother realized what they were looking at nearly broke my heart.  By the time that my father and Seth's father realized why their wives were screaming I was crying, quietly, on the other end of the line.  I've never wanted to be somewhere else, so desperately, in my entire life.

Being, as my dad so eloquently put it the other day, "within the weather map" of home has been amazing, in part because it's allowed me to continue my seven week streak of seeing people I love just about every weekend (and taking zero days with them), but also because it's put me in close proximity to my sister.  Her belly has grown tremendously each of the three times I've seen her since March, and every time I see her, after I say hello to her, I bend down and say hello to my little niece or nephew.  I pat my sister's belly, and and tell the peanut to grow well, because I can't wait to welcome him or her to this glorious world.

 

AWESOME!

(Hey, SisterPants: nice job one-upping me this summer.)

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.

VERMONT!

It is impossible to say this without emotion, so please excuse the capital letters. I am excited to report that VERMONT HAS MOUNTAINS!

(Even better than the mountains, however is this: I saw my PARENTS today for the first time in OVER FOUR MONTHS. They met me at the top of Stratton Mountain and brought me all my favorite things to eat and something new to read. I cried. It was all kinds of perfect. It feels SO DAMN GOOD to be this close to home.)

(Also: FIVE weekends in a row seeing people I love. How awesome is that?)

UH-OH

For the record, the internal frame of my backpack is not supposed to look like this. My duct tape supply is wrapped around my trekking poles (which are waiting for me in Manchester Center, VT, after I accidentally left them in the trunk of a friend's car over the weekend), so I borrowed some from a fellow thru-hiker. Three days to a new backpack!

My Thoughts Exactly

Greetings from Mount Greylock, the highest point in the great state of Massachusetts. I found both of these monuments on the summit, and thought them to be quite beautiful, in very different ways. Tomorrow: VERMONT!

Moving in Massachusetts

A small part of me was hoping that the Boston Red Sox would meet me at the border with a six pack of Sam Adams, a lemon scone from Sherman Cafe in Somerville, and a welcome home hug for Massachusetts' prodigal daughter.  Unfortunately the only thing that welcomed me into the current state of my (homeless) residence was a brutal heat wave, which, to put it mildly, was a bit of a bummer.  Thankfully my restful stay with my wonderful aunts, uncles, grandma, and cousins well prepared me for the heat, and gave me this to think about when I was starting to have difficult moments coping: my family contains some of the greatest people on Earth, and I am so deeply thankful to have them in my life.

I've been hiking like hell since the start of the heat wave, and am looking forward to taking tomorrow off at Upper Goose Pond, where there will be much swimming and revelry.  After that it's back to work for me, and time to make miles.  As it turns out, I have less than 650 miles until I'm done with the trail... and it feels rather funny to think that I'm almost done (although 650 miles is still Virginia + Georgia + Maryland, which is a lot).  How did that happen?

Anyhow, in case you want to send me a letter, here are my next couple mail drops.  Send letters to: Bree Carlson, Thru-Hiker; General Delivery,

• Killington Vermont, 05701 (by August 2nd)
• West Hartford, Vermont, 05084 (by August 6)
• Hanover, New Hampshire, 03755 (by August 8)

WOAH!  NEW HAMPSHIRE!

Creepy Guys, Part Two

It's been a while since I wrote about the creepy guys on the trail, so in order to balance the overwhelming stream of positivity that I've been blasting you all with, I figure it's about time I brought you all up to speed.  Before I go any farther with my story, I want you all to know this: my Uncle Mark gave me a small knife.  Now, I doubt very much that I'm going to use it for anything other than cutting neat slices of cheddar cheese (and I doubt that I'll even be doing that much, as I've been eating cheese directly from the package like a savage animal), but I thought you all should know.  I started the trail with both a trusty knife and a can of mace, but when I didn't use either for a week I sent them home.

One of the things that I heard a lot in my first week on the trail (and in some of the books I read before I started) was this: watch out for the town guys.  The idea was that guys from the towns I passed through weren't part of the thru-hiker community, and consequently could be planning nefarious things for all of us delicate-as-a-flower thru-hiking women. Well, my friends, as far as I can tell, that advice is bullshit. Bad guys are everywhere, and being a thru-hiker doesn't mean that any guy (or woman) is automatically safe for me to be around. (Furthermore, thru-hikers tend to smell... uh... unpleasant, and no townie, male or female, really wants to be around that kind of odor.)

I've noticed in the past few months that I'm getting a lot harder.  I've stopped giving guys second chances: you say something creepy or act weird around me, and I'm getting the hell away from you, immediately. I got into a conversation with a thru-hiker I met two weeks ago who told me that he started on January 1st (red flag: why aren't you farther ahead?), was hiking in jeans (red flag: cotton kills!), carried a BIG knife strapped to his hip (red flag: not necessary, unless you're completely paranoid), and who kept mentioning that he's spent a lot of time in town lately trying to get "medicine" (red flag: most people don't tell strangers about the "medicine" they need).  Anyhow, I recognized right away that I was supposed to be asking about this "medicine," but instead of playing along, I left as soon as I filled my platypus with water.  I didn't want to know, I didn't care, and I didn't have to ask.  So I didn't.

Back in North Carolina a thru-hiker in the bar was chatting with a group of us, when all of a sudden he looked me in the eye, said "I'm sorry, but I can't help it" and ruffled the stubble on the top of my head.  At first I laughed it off, but then I got royally pissed.  What right did he have to touch me?  None.  When he came over later to apologize I had one of those moments of clarity: I don't HAVE to be nice, I don't HAVE to smile and look pretty, and I don't HAVE to accept his apology.  So when he started to say he was sorry, I tore into him, telling him to keep his fucking hands to himself, and to get the hell out of the bar.  I said a couple other things too, which caused him to back up and leave the bar so quickly he didn't even say goodbye to his friends.  I haven't seen him since.

The creepiest guy I ran into out here, however, was a guy whose name is synonymous with those overnight flights from the west coast (I'll call him "RE").  I first met RE in Waynesboro, VA, when I was camping at the YMCA. I heard through the hiker gossip grapevine that he'd tried thru-hiking in 2009, but was arrested on a drug related charge, and when he tried to complete the hike in 2010 ended up locked up in a mental institution, which he had recently sprung himself from.  Now, I don't know if any of that is true, but I do know this: I don't like people who talk non-stop, are very twitchy, drink too much, and periodically break out into freestyle raps about the Appalachian Trail.  I hiked like hell to get away from him, but two weeks later I came across him at a shelter at lunchtime.  I kept my distance, setting up a good 30 feet away at a picnic table to start pulling together my lunch. He was acting a bit odd, but when he started having conversations with invisible people, giggling maniacally, and then barking (while all the time not noticing my presence) I packed up my lunch and left immediately.  If my phone had still had battery life I would have immediately called the police, but instead I hiked fast until I found a friend, and warned away everyone who was hiking south towards the shelter.  The next day, when I did have a working cell phone again, I texted all of my friends who were behind to give them a heads up.  At no point did RE bother me directly, but I sure as hell wasn't going to give him a chance to do so.

When I told these stories to my Aunt Margi today, she suggested that perhaps it isn't that I'm losing my niceness on the trail, but that I'm losing my naivete.  And I think she's right.  While there are lots of people who are absolutely amazing and wonderful and who consistently demonstrate the absolute apex of humanity, I'm recognizing more and more that there are also people with whom I do not want to give any of my time. So I don't.  And that's been fantastic.