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.