Trail of Tears

At 3:30 Sunday I was relieved, nearly ecstatic, to spot my truck at the gravel pull-off where I had left it the day before, toss off my 38 pound pack, peel off my wet, muddy boots and socks, find the Mets game crystal clear on WFAN 660, and turn the ignition. A Fuddruckers burger was just down Route 23 and my wife, my babies, my beer, and my sofa were just an air-conditioned drive away.

No such luck for Lothar, who was sitting on the roadside, examining his gnarly fossilized toenails, swatting at real and imagined mosquitos, picking at the blisters and dead tissue on his feet and applying rations of duct tape to the rawest spots. Lothar is actually the “trail name”1 of my friend Chris’ brother. Lothar, at least what’s left of him, was and still is hiking the Appalachian Scenic Trail Northbound (NOBO) from Georgia to Maine (GAME).


I had first smelled Lothar about 28 hours earlier at the High Point (NJ) State Park Visitor’s Center. He had hiked 3 miles that morning, 22 the day before, and 1223 in the past 4 months. His hobbled gait, voluminous beard, vicious funk, mosquito-pocked flesh, and grimly determined demeanor belied every step. He had started the trip fat and unhappy, looking to reboot his life as a lost, lonely, portly, tech-guy living in Milwaukee (there was not even a girl that lured him to Milwaukee, he went on his own accord!). He was now gaunt and unhappy in the face of an entirely new set of problems. He had lost 60 pounds, and I could tell, without having met him before, that he was a changed man.

Chris and Lothar hugged, after an awkward pause (How should I greet this building dweller? Should I touch this stinky person?), they went off to town to restock Lothar’s food supply.

Lucy and I prepped for the trail and anxiously watched the intensifying rain. The rangers at the center warned of severe thunderstorms approaching. I love hiking and camping, but not in severe thunderstorms, and Lucy and I were fighting the temptation to spend our precious day off under a roof watching Tiger win the British Open. There were two main reasons we went ahead and hit the trail in the gathering rain:

1. Lothar had been hiking through rain, cold, heat, mosquitos, pain, rocks, joy, apathy,
and despair for 4 months. The whole idea was to get a sense of what hiking the AT was all about…lace ‘em up and hike, day in, day out, rain or shine, no excuses.

2. For a nature lover penned up in the subdivisions of Long Island, and a father of two babies, this was a rare opportunity to sleep under the stars (even if obscured by clouds) and be a lone wolf once again. Darcy had taken the boys on a weekend excursion to Hershey, PA for her grandfather, Bop’s, family reunion. I was mercifully excused from this trip, which involved about 500 highway miles with Darcy, Bop, two babies, and my mother-in-law in a minivan heading to a Howard Johnson’s in Central Pennsylvania in July to visit with family I had never met.
The kicker: it turned out the reunion was DRY!!! No wine, no beer, no Zima, no nada. (Rock and roll music and dancing were allowed, although frowned upon.) These were mostly Christian folks, for kicks they wore red, white, and/or blue and played Bingo. No wonder Bop ran off in his youth to Long Island, where he would never be too far from a good Martini.

Darcy was able to enjoy herself without me there grumbling and groaning. I almost wished I was there just to see the look on my face when I arrived on a hot, humid Saturday surrounded by star-spangled Christian strangers and fished around unsuccessfully through the coolers full of Sprites and Mr. Pibbs. It was especially bittersweet to miss the motorized wheelchair accident – an old lady flipped her Rascal on the way up a hill to the picnic pavilion. (She was OK.) God Bless America.

This pic from the reunion was enough for me

Instead, Lothar, Chris, Lucy, and I set off to march through the rain and humidity. It poured for the first few miles, but Lothar, in a rare moment of optimism, noted that at least the rain kept the mosquitos at bay. We were descending, mostly, from the High Point of New Jersey, and between the pack on my back and the pup on my leash, it took a lot of effort not to fall and slip on every wet rock. I had been given the gift of a bacheloresque weekend to spend however I pleased, and I had chosen to spend it walking in the rain and sleeping with a wet, dirty dog.

Lothar told us of the past 100 miles or so, New Jersey and all of Pennsylvania, which had been a rocky hell, gingerly picking his way over slippery rocks through a lowland haze of hot moist air and clouds of biting insects. Good times!

We left the State Park and traversed private land, idle cow pastures dotted with fetid ponds. Apparently, a considerable portion of the AT was dull like this: dodging cow patties, ticks, and farmer’s dogs. Lothar had even plowed through an 18 mile stretch of cornfields back in PA.

Things did brighten. The worst of the thunderstorms missed us, the sky cleared, and we found the “Secret Shelter”, a cabin just run by Jim, a guy who had hiked the trail in 1989. He decided to build land adjacent to the trail, dig a well, build a cabin with a fan, heat, a covered porch, a huge sink, and a shower, and tend the grounds, a field running up a small mountain into the woods. This was a taste of “Trail Magic”, an AT phenomenon in which folks sympathetic to the hikers feed, house, transport and boost the spirits of the beleaguered thru-hiking set.
Despite the housing, I went ahead and pitched my tent. The whole point was to sleep outside, and, frankly, sleeping naked on a nest of fire ants would be preferable to being confined in close quarters with Lothar’s funk. I kept suggesting that Lothar make use of the shower. Rude, yes, but after inhaling his assy vapor cloud for hours I had lost any use for politeness. True, it was his trail, but this was our neck of the woods, also known as civilization. Take a shower, dude.

The shower wasn’t working, but Lothar changed shirts, and it became apparent that it was Lothar’s shirt, and not Lothar, that was the main offender. He had worn the same shirt for every mile and it had achieved a putridity (3 parts B.O./ 1 part mildew / 1 part manure) that no detergent could dispel. Why not, I asked aloud, buy a new shirt for part II of the trip? Wasn’t 140 days and 1200 miles a lot to ask of any garment?

Lothar explained the shirt was a badge of honor. Like his beard and his blisters, it announced him as a bona fide thru-hiker, and not just a thru-passer like us. We agreed to disagree. I would only have to smell him for one more day.

Dinner and conversation were pleasant enough. I brought cigars, which warded off mosquitos, though Lothar, ironically, complained about the smell. It was too cloudy for stargazing, but as the dusk grew thicker, the field went ablaze with fireflies in a lightshow as brilliant as the starriest of skies. Through the dusk and flashes of yellow light crept up the two donkeys who lived in the field. Jim had warned us that the two jackasses, both males, liked to fight and make considerable noise in doing so. All the hikers who had passed through before had made note in the log that this was the one drawback in what was otherwise paradise. Sure enough, starting at nightfall, and every twenty minutes thereafter, one jackass or another belched out a horrendous braying shriek along with some belligerent snorts. They seemed to have moved as close to our camp as possible just to mess with us all night. No wonder “jackass” is a slur.

Despite the aural onslaught and the occasional rainshower, Lucy and I slept well. We woke up to sunshine, with the air clear and cool for midsummer in Jersey. Lothar, surprisingly, was last to wake up. He took his time packing up. He took his time at breakfast…we walked a half mile off the trail so he could stuff his gullet with pancakes and eggs and breakfast meat. He took his time at the General Store after breakfast, then took his time downing a tomato and a large Gatorade before we returned to the trail. A mile after that, in a particularly buggy area, he stopped to look in his pack for his mesh headgear, while the bugs feasted on us. Even on the trail he was surprisingly sluggish. I understood he had suffered through many a mile, and his whole body must have ached, but we were walking over fairly flat, firm ground. He was towards the back of the pack of this year’s hikers, and, if things didn’t go well in the tougher stretches of New England ahead, there was a chance that Mt. Katahdin, the endpoint in Maine, would be snowed in before he could summit and complete his mission.

Wherever he was in the pack, Lothar, to his credit, had endured a great deal and seemed unwavering in his commitment to stay the course. If he does so, he will join a fairly elite club. Of the 2000 or so this year who decided hiking the AT would be a fun thing to do, only about 20%, or 400, will make it the whole way. Most quit not because of physical exhaustion, but mental fatigue. They get bored of doing the same thing every day, tired of the bugs, the aches, the dirt, and the lean cuisine. They could finish, if they really wanted to, but they lose their will to go on. They take a day off, take a shower, drink some beers and play some pool, and simply can’t will themselves back on the path.

Lothar has not lost his will. He said he was going to do this, and, goddammit, he is doing it. He is a stubborn son of a bitch. Besides, he quit his old life to do this, so if he quit this, where would that leave him?

We walked through fields, forests, and swamps, across roads, around bogs, and over a small mountain. In the heat of midday, we walked around three sides of a boggy, fairly unsightly “wildlife viewing area” that seemed to be an overflow of the Walkill River. When the trail reentered the woods, I saw that we could have walked along the road and then down just one small stretch of the bog and saved ourselves at least a mile. I though it was kind of cruel for the trailmakers to do that to the hikers. “Doesn’t your book help you out?” I asked. “Tell you where you can shave a mile here and there?”

Lothar looked very disappointed in me. “The Appalachian Trail follows the white blazes. I can’t file for my certification with the Appalachian Mountain Club unless I hiked the actual trail. I guess you would be a blue-blazer.”

“What’s a blue-blazer?”

“Someone who takes shortcuts.”

“I guess I would be a blue-blazer, then. I kind of like to choose my own way. Be spontaneous, you know.”

That was when the whole idea of the AT really soured for me, and any fantasies I had had of hiking the AT became nightmares. Lothar was on a 2100 mile conveyor belt, and he could not dismount, no matter how miserable he was, lest he forever be more miserable for quitting. He had lost sixty pounds, he had proven that he could keep walking through any and all brands of adversity, he had freed himself from the false trappings of civilization, but was he enjoying himself? It didn’t seem so. Would he enjoy himself any more when there were no more white blazes and only the mild discomfort and lesser tedium of daily living to contend with once again? I guess, in about 2 months and 900 miles, he'll find out.


1 SOME TRAIL NAMES:

"Lothar" – derived from “Lothar of the Hill People” a bygone Mike Meyers SNL character. A cool name, though I couldn’t help but notice it sounds like a lisped person saying “Loser”

"Beer Nuts" – Excellent name. Probably won’t finish the AT, though, some pub is bound to claim him.

"Minnesota Smith" – according to Lothar, an extremely annoying hiker with extremely backwards views about women’s rights who seemed to be on the trail, populated mostly by smelly men and independent, liberal-minded women, to find a mate??? A lot of these people are confused.

"Teddy Ruxpin" – the hot chick hiker, a few days ahead, and surrounded by a support crew of young would-be-suitors the way Lance Armstrong had his support crew of lesser bikers.

"Lone Wolf" – Back when Darcy and I first met, I used to tell her I was a “Lone Wolf”. That was a long time ago.

"State Line Jay" – Smokes a “J” at every state line.

"Wingfoot", a.k.a “Winged Fag” - the author of the must-carry AT guide. Controversy surrounds him…he has been accused of being a pedophile and a sleeping bag penis groper. Still, his is the best guide out there.

"Cujo" – Lucy’s trail name.

"Grizzly Man" – My trail name.

Radioactive Ridge

Keep that bed clean, Lucy.

This week we’ve been installing a solar system out at Ridge, which is like going upstate without having to cross any bridges. It’s scary quiet out there, we saw more wild turkeys than cars passing by today. There are woodsy pieces of property you just don’t see across the rest of Long Island’s thoroughly parceled out and diced up landscape. You can hear horses whinnying off in the distance, and the homeowner, Gay, puts out a sack full of apples to feed the deer every night. Her neighbors don’t approve of the practice, but, as Gay put it, “The deer don’t eat my shrubs.”

Part of why this neighborhood remains so rustic is its proximity to Brookhaven National Lab. I’m not sure exactly what, if any, dangerous activity goes on at BNL, but after doing a few jobs there I’ve heard enough anecdotes to keep me from house hunting in the area myself, turkeys or no turkeys. There is the legend of the piece of radioactive material put in a field just for semi-scientific shits and giggles, which proceeded to eradicate every living thing in a quarter-mile radius, a perfect circle of death. I’ve heard claims that the breast cancer rate in the vicinity is the highest of anywhere on Long Island, which has a nasty reputation for high breast cancer rates in its own right. Who can really predict the consequences of having a particle accelerator, visible from space, just beyond your backyard? On the bright side, a past solar client in the neighborhood was convinced that whatever was cooking over at the lab was responsible for the prolific production of his tomato plants.

Gay, who is, in fact, quite pleasant and gay, seems content to enjoy the wildlife and not worry about half-lifes. She even announced today that she was headed off to the tanning salon, even though it was July 13th and her skin (she is in her fifties and already too tan) could use a vacation, perhaps an Alaskan cruise.

Gay is especially gay now that the solar panels are finally here. She keeps cooing in her singsong Southern sunshiny voice that they’re “Purrr-dee”, which is great because a happy customer means a happy me. She has been a little too excited from the getgo for my taste – it means we can only disappoint her – and I am waiting for the other shoe to drop, like when her husband finally comes home from Bike Week and says, “What the f--- is this abomination? Tear it down! Now!”

Gay is a talker. With very little prompting I have learned a great deal about her life, including the tragic tale of her recently-deceased, 15-year-old Rottweiler whose bedding needed to be changed and washed 5-6 times a day because he was incontinent, poor thing. (I guess this tale was apropos of her high electric bill?) I smiled politely and did not tell her that my dear mutt Lucy, who is a healthy 3+ years, would be scheduled for a one-way trip to the vet if I had to wash her bedding more than 3 times in any given month. Of course, I have babies to deal with and she does not, that wasn’t in the cards for her. But Gay does have quite a tan, a huge backyard, some "purdee" solar panles, 4 mottled pound dogs, 5 cats and her very own growing herd of glowing deer.

Headbutting an Italian

Zenedine Zidane, my new anti-hero

I've been watching a lot of sports lately. After five years of sucking, the Mets are one of the best, and definitely the most exciting, teams in baseball, and they are on every night on their own new SNY network, a combination that, for me, is what cocaine and baking powder was to Pooky.

What about going and playing outside? Well, look...I work, which for me is the new play, all day installing solar panels on rooftops. I come home sunbaked and tired, so any guilt I feel about being a couch potato in my free time does not keep me from sleeping at night to wake up and do it all again.

Plus, there's the babies. Andre can't take a decent nap unless he is lying on somebody's lap. If I use Andre's lap-napping strategically, I can look like a good Dad while wasting a beautiful Sunday sitting on a Laz-Y-Boy watching Federer whup Nadal at Wimbledon, David Wright hit another late inning, go- ahead homer against the Marlins, and the French and Italians do some weird-ass soccer shit at the World Cup Final.

I gotta admit, I got a little bit into the soccer. I even left a delightful little encampment with the family at the beach to go back inside to catch the Final. When I turned the game on, it was in the 23rd minute and the score was France 1, Italy 1, which meant I had missed more scoring than had occured in the rest of tournament, and, as it turned out, all the scoring that would happen that afternoon.

I was rooting for France, mostly because of their leader, Zenedine Zidane. After only a match and a-half, I had decided that this guy was one the one guy on the fields of Germany that I could root for. He was a man among boys, a hockey player among soccer players. He didn't flop like an extra in a John Wayne movie whenever some Portugese or Brazilian defender nudged him. He didn't roll around and howl as if he had stepped on a land mine any time an opposing player's foot hit his. He ran like a normal person, not a Looney Tunes character, and he clearly didn't spend a lot of time in front of mirror perfecting his bangs before the game.

A week ago I knew next to nil about Zidane or international soccer, but I learned, in the following order, that he was bald, somewhat menacing, amazingly good (even to my clueless eye) at keeping control of the ball and distributing it to his teammates (at times it looked like me dribbling our big supermarket bouncy ball around my 9 month old sons), and as clutch as David Wright, Derek Jeter, and Big Papi combined. If Magic Johnson and Mark Messier had a baby, it would be Zidane. France, under his undeniable leadership, had beaten the vaunted Brazil squad twice. Zidane scored twice in France's victory in 1998 and assisted the lone goal last Saturday in the quarterfinal. He took all the big penalty kicks and nailed them cold, and he did it with a poker-faced flair. On yesterday's kick for instance, he stutter-stepped, then chipped it high and soft, at quarter-speed, off the underside of the crossbar and just over the line. The Italian goalie could have caught it with one hand if he wasn't already flying away in the wrong direction. It was a balsy little trick shot on a big stage, kind of like dropping a suicide squeeze bunt in the late innings of Game 7 of the World Series.

I was fascinated by Zidane's demeanor: stoic, confident, yet aloof, as if everyone else on the field, including his teammates, annoyed him with their mortality. But then, after the semifinal win over Portugal, he did one of those weird soccer things that make the sport intriguing and repelling all at once. Rather than celebrate with his teammates, dancing and sliding like fraternity brothers at the last hour of Pig Roast, he got into a long, sweaty embrace with Figo, one of the Portugese stars. They whispered sweet nothings in one another's ears like summer camp lovers headed back to the backseats of their respective minivans, and, to my amazement, they took off their sweaty jerseys and exchanged them. Had Zidane just given Figo his varsity jacket?! I better call Becky. Then Zidane rejoined the endless celebration in front of the French fans, WEARING THE PORTUGESE PLAYER'S JERSEY!!! It was just so weird and degrading, yet noble...that acknowledgement of the emasculated opponent's worthiness, manhood defined in an entirely foreign body language. I tried to imagine Jeter dancing around Yankee Stadium in Varitek's Red Sox jersey in 2003. Bizarre behavior like this is what keeps me coming back to watch a little bit of soccer every four to eight years.

The game went on as they all do, building to occasional near-misses, a strip tease where the panties and pasties always stay put. France's initial penalty shot, it turned out, was on a bogus call, but as the game went on, France began to legitimately dominate. Of course, this didn't mean they could actually put the ball in the net. Zidane created many good opportunities for his strikers, and he scorched a header (it's the headwork that is truly amazing to us soccer inept Americans) that was barely, but beautifully blocked by the Italian goalie, Buffont.

The game, of course, went into OT, and, of course, a second OT, because even the best players in the world can't actually make a goal in soccer. But, it appeared, however, that France had the edge...they kept the ball in Italy's half of the field and kept getting good chances. Italy was basically just trying to stick their tired asses in the way of the French shots. Zidane went down at one point (I missed this, I was watching my Mets, who can finally be counted on to score more than soccer teams), but he was able to stay in the game. It was only a matter of time before Zidane struck, and, even if they didn't score, they would have him to set the tone for the penalty kicks. France was in good shape.

Then, it happened. In the 110th of 120 minutes, Zidane struck. That is, as he was jogging back upfield alongside his Italian defender, he turned to face the Italian, lowered his shoulders, and charged the Italian like a raging bull, spearing him in the solarplexus and toppling him to the ground.

We, the TV audience, didn't see this because it occured away from the ball, off camera. All we knew was that play had stopped because another Italian was flopping around like a fish out of water again, we waited for him to suddenly decide it was just a flesh wound and spring back up, then we saw the replay, and I think I speak for the entire world when I say we thought, "What the f--- just happened?" in our myriad languages.

A ref had seen the whole thing, and the fans in the stadium had seen the replay, so, legend or no legend, the French star was given a red card and sent off the field forever (he had announced his impending retirement before the tournament), with no replacement, and little chance of winning the old-fashioned way since it was now 10 against 11.

The French, without Zidane, did, in fact, lose, in penalty kicks (a cheesy way to end the "World's greatest tournament"...like ending an NCAA tournament game with a free-throw shooting contest.) This was not surprising. What was amazing was that this great player, in the greatest of games, in the most important of moments, his last game, his last moment, would throw everything away for cheap shot. Apparently...and Zidane has not yet spoken to the press as far as I know...any information I have I got from Wikipedia, which had been updated minutes after the incident...apparently the Italian, Marco Materazzi, made some sort of racial slur (Zidane is of Algerian descent, he grew up in a housing project in Marseilles), and that is what set Zidane off. (A day later now the rumor is that Materazzi called him a "dirty terrorist" and said something nasty about his family...this is according to my wife's Bible of websites, urbanbaby.com. Sportscenter also just reported hearsay that Materazzi was seen "twisting Zidane's nipples". )

But what a cheap shot! A forehead to the sternum! So gallantly brutal, primordial. Unimaginable even after it happened, like Tyson biting off a piece of Holyfield's ear. And in that instant, Zidane, who had been nearing legend status...a Jordan, a Pele, or even on a higher pedestal internationally if he could create the winning shot just one more time...became more like a Tyson, a great athlete brought low by his own fatal flaw of rage. Tyson and Zidane are ghetto, underneath all else, and it has occured to me that Zidane might be more comfortable as the object of everyone's scorn (and pity) than on a Wheaties box.

I know now that Zidane has a history of field rage: he had stomped and headbutted before in club and international play. He has accumulated more red cards than I have speeding tickets, which is no small feat. I also have read that the Italian players have a reputation for racism. (Their history of nipple twisting is well-documented and needs not be revisited here.)

Conventional wisdom is that Zidane embarrassed himself, let his country down, and degraded his sport. I find the conventional wisdom lacking a little in this case.

What remains for me is a mixed feeling of pained admiration for Zidane and outright disgust for the Italian and for drama-queen style soccer in general. Clearly Materazzi, whose team was limping around aimlessly, said or did something awful to try to draw the bull over a cliff. I think he even flopped on the head butt, making the blow look more severe than it was. Materazzi had a lot more gamesmanship than he had game at that point, which epitomizes what I saw of many of the soccer players/actors in the World Cup. His ploy worked perfectly, and he got the Italians the cup they clearly weren't going to get the honest way. Materazzi is a champion pussy in a sport that encourages pussiness. The Italian victory was dissapointing, at best, and his sport will continue to dissapoint until they start rewarding playmakers and banishing floppers. I wish that Zidane had been man enough to laugh off the provocation and go on to glory, but in the end, maybe it was more important for him to express how he felt about racist, flopping, pretty-boy nipple twisters ruining his sport. If that was the case, too bad he didn't hit Materazzi a little harder, and sent him into the hospital and off the field, like Zidane, forever.