How to reach Springer Mountain

Neels Gap, GA

“Now we’re getting somewhere!,” cry the founders of a town at the beginning of Hermann Hesse’s fairy tale, “The City.” Millennia pass, the town grows and shrinks, becomes a government center, an intellectual hub, a muddy backwater. The story ends with the last inhabitant’s death, with the slow regrowth of the forest, and the even slower eroding of the valley. “Now we’re getting somewhere,” cry the trees to the mountain at the story’s end.

Amicalola Falls State Park, where the nine-mile approach trail to the official Appalachian Trail begins, felt less like a beginning and more like a destination. A live owl perched on an interpreter’s arm in the visitor center, and another park volunteer stood in a corner playing with a corn snake. We signed our names in the thru-hiker register, halfway down the third full page of registered thru-hikers for the day. The book for the season was 200 pages thick.

We paused for pictures at the arch. We fielded last minute worries from Mollie’s mother. I had dealt with similar worries on the phone the night before. Did we have antibiotics? What about snakes? Ticks? Fleas? Chiggers? Hillbillies? What if we broke a leg, sprained an ankle? What if a dog fell off a cliff?

Fears are natural. My own guts felt like jelly for a week before those first steps toward Maine, but I will say this: I cannot imagine anything on the trail reaching the level of danger achieved during the three hour traffic jam through Atlanta. Trucks cut us off. Cars cut us off. We took a wrong turn somewhere. The Clampett family spilled their entire hoop-dee across the interstate. I prayed hard for safe deliverance to the trailhead.

By the time we said our tearful good-byes at the state park archway, the dogs were howling loud enough for the cars back in Atlanta to screech to another halt. For the first mile, they drug us up the 500 steps to the top of the falls, carried along with the thousands of day visitors and tour groups who gawked at our packs and frowned when, inevitably, the dogs decided to take craps right on the side of the trail, in full view of every person walking by. Maggie howled while I attempted to scoop the piles further into the woods.

“You were right,” Mollie said. “I’m a misanthrope.”

Funny though. The instant the pavement ended, the crowds disappeared. They didn’t dissipate, or slacken. It took about five steps up the dirt path from the parking lot atop the falls before we were alone. In the next eight miles to the top of Springer Mountain and the official start of the trail, we came across maybe 6 more people.

Something happens when blind optimism clashes with reality, and that thing is a rainstorm. We had grand expectations of wilderness. We had even bolder ideas about the progress we could make on the trail. We figured 15 miles a day; we guessed we could make it two weeks between resupply sites. In reality, we made half that distance, and found that we had packed heavy by over 25 pounds, every ounce of it in food.

So of course, it had to rain. And when it rains, it pours. Down in the lower elevations, parts of Georgia flooded. Up on the mountain tops, we walked through the rain clouds. Mollie’s knee acted up. I chafed in terrible places. The dogs growled and whined at their wet packs. My rain coat failed to repel rain. The trail climbed and descended too steeply. Our packs gained even more weight.

Still, rain in the woods means that you’ll be wet, and we learned to cope with it. When it stopped after a day and a half, we dried out.

More interesting to me thus far has been the number of people who apparently have never been camping before. At the Gooch Mountain Shelter, we took Maggie down the hill to take care of her business, and she uncovered an uneaten bratwurst, tossed aside not twenty yards from our tent. People left socks, micro-trash, piles of uncooked ramen noodles. One young female hiker accidently dropped a chunk of cheese on the ground, and rather than throw it into the garbage (or, like a really good hiker, dust off the mud and eat it anyway), she tossed it out into the rain. Nobody commented on the act. Sadie ate the cheese.

The first ten pages of the thru-hiker’s guide are devoted to Leave No Trace ethics. Every mile along the trail signs have been posted about bears. Other hikers have had mice chew into their ultralight gear to eat forgotten Snickers bars.
Still, if towns are only a day or two and a shuttle ride away, and the wilderness trip I imagined feels more like a traveling party, why expect anything other than a party etiquette? I like to think that the litterers will learn. Maybe a journey like this is good for such people. Maybe the point of this trail is to teach us that we have to deal with the load we choose to carry. Or maybe that’s cliché, and folks ought to learn to pick up their trash.

On the Origins of Women Who Walk With Dogs

Hiking in the White Mountains north of Fairbanks.

 

When I was eight, I became the youngest camper to attend Camp Merrie-Woode’s five-week session. Though my record has since been eclipsed, I took great pride in being one of the correct answers on Trivia Night. I will admit to some bouts of homesickness. Okay, maybe I even woke up crying once or twice. But let’s get to the point. During the special summer of 1994, I went on my first overnight backpacking trip. It was a three-day hiking excursion to some wonderful location in the Appalachians that I can’t at this point recall. What I do recall is that, as an eight year-old, I made some very poor decisions about backcountry living.

I started out with an external frame pack much like this one: 

It was a “youth” size pack, but my eight year-old self was apparently sub-youth size. When I leaned over too far on the trail, I would roll until my body and the pack assumed a turtle-like position. Then I would lay there until the next girl came along to roll me back up. It was great fun, for the first hour at least.

We slept in a two-tarp system. One large tarp strung up between four trees, and one slightly smaller tarp on the ground. Somehow I ended up on the edge. Around midnight, rain began to fall. It occurred to me, surrounded as I was by the sound of falling water, that I had a pressing need to urinate. Around the same time, I made the unfortunate discovery that I was scared of the dark woods. I decided to relieve myself in my sleeping bag. And because the bag was soaked on the top from the rain, no one noticed that it was soaked on the bottom from me. By the time we broke camp I had rolled my liquid-logged sleeping bag and strapped it, now 5 lbs. heavier, to the bottom of my pack. Success!

Ahh, but luck would have it that my wool socks, hand-me-downs from my older brothers (and perhaps my mother before them?), had also gotten wet during the night. As we hiked, the socks itched, scratched, and bunched. I tried rolling them down, so that the red and white cloth name tag my mother had sewn into them was on display. (Charlie ^ Mollie Murray, it read.) Nothing helped. Childlike intuition told me that if the socks were the problem, I would be much better off without them. (If thy right hand offendeth, cut it off?) So I hiked the seven miles out to the camp van with my bare feet tied loosely inside my wet boots.

(Having since been employed as a camp counselor, I should note here that the resulting condition of my feet and the mildewed smell that haunted my pack until its early retirement were NOT the fault of the trip leaders. I was, and have always been, verrrrry sneeeeaky about my bad habits. And perhaps a wee bit stubborn about asking for help…)

It wasn’t until we arrived back at camp and I hobbled up the hill to the infirmary with the aid of a large stick that someone saw my bloody feet. A week later, I could walk again.

I’d like to think I’ve learned a lot about outdoor travel since then. I have, for example, purchased a new sleeping bag. (Don’t worry – I washed the old one, too.) But let’s be serious for a moment.

I’ve learned to be confident in my own strength. I’ve learned to be humble in the face of wildness. More than both of these, though, I’ve learned that one trip is never enough. That euphoric post-trip glow always fades in the face of deadlines and dresses. At some point I forget the lessons I’ve learned in the woods and I even start believing some of the things I’m told by the world – among them, that women have to use beauty products to be beautiful (same root word, right?). Or, another good one, that women don’t belong in the woods.

I need this trip. My recent experiences have made me aware that some people still believe women don’t belong in the workforce. Or if they do (this admitted grudgingly), they should be in lesser positions. Disposable positions.

And here’s the thing. If my wild intuition (shout out to Dr. Pinkola Estés here) was damaged enough to move across the country for a job that I was over-qualified for and then to work in an environment where my only defense against a superintendent who never acknowledged my existence was a principal who tugged at my skirt under the table and told me I looked like a little schoolgirl during a meeting, I’ve got some more learning to do.

You might say that I entered into an isolated cultural pocket in rural Missouri, and you’d be right. But if the issues of women at work are widespread enough that the president of our nation recently devoted a speech to them, I’d argue that my experiences were not so unique.

On a more positive note, I’m looking forward to the growth that awaits me on the trail. I’m thirsty for the restorative power of wilderness. More than entering another bad situation, I’m afraid of carrying this anger and bitterness with me too long. If I let anger (or fear) defeat my ambitions, those forces which wish to see me held down have won. I simply can’t allow that to happen.

So when I start the trail on Saturday, I will set out with an extra pair of dry socks and a fierce hope. I’ll be carrying a three-piece walking stick (conceived and hand-crafted at Creekside Farms Woodworking Studio in Wisconsin) that converts to a camp chair. Yeah, that’s right- a tripod stool walking stick. See photos below. I’ll be accompanied by a dashing young man and two of the best-looking dogs I’ve ever seen.

And in honor of my friend Kristin, a seasoned hiker and inspiring outdoorswoman, I’ll be wearing a skirt.

Next post from the trail!!

Here’s the walking stick: 1/3 butternut, 1/3 Diamond Willow from Alaska, 1/3 bass wood. Find instructions here.

Note: Unfortunately, tripod stool does not triple as a dog bed. Harumph.

Looking for alligators in the moat at Ft. Pulaski on the Georgia coast. Photo courtesy of Joel Messick.

Roughing It: Preparations on the Georgia Coast

Last Christmas, when we visited my parents in Wisconsin, I found a creepy bearded guy sitting on the windowsill in the living room. It wasn’t my father.

“It’s a shelf elf,” my mother said. “Your father carved it.”

Dad had taken up woodcarving, and for his first major project he had made a little gnome that you could balance on the corners of windows, doors, desks—really anywhere, so long as it could catch you by surprise.
A group of retirees (no offense to any retirees reading this, I’ve always thought it a noble profession) whittled away every Monday morning in a back room at the Cumberland Senior Center, and the meetings, along with basswood shavings that stuck to the bottom of stocking feet, had become part of my parents’ weekly routine.

By the time we went back to Missouri, Dad had advanced from shelf elf to shelf duck, and he had started Mollie on a shelf elf of her own. She returned to Missouri with a half dozen cut-outs, a knife (sharpened on a wheel Dad concocted out of a piece of firewood and a leather belt from the Goodwill), and a book full of ideas.

But more on this later.

In exactly one week, we will be lacing up our boots at the trailhead in north Georgia’s Amicalola Falls State Park. That is, if everything goes as planned, we start the trail next Saturday.

Plans haven’t been easy to set down this past month. Our plans changed when we lost our jobs. We had planned a practice trip in Southeastern Oklahoma, had planned to start hiking in Maine, headed south. Yet here we sit in Georgia, and at nearly every meal we’ve shared with friends and family since we started driving, people want to know what we’re planning for jobs in the fall. Aside from this walk, neither Mollie nor I have any idea what comes next.

It’s a scary prospect, not knowing what’s on the road ahead. And my optimism has been frustrated by a burning resentment toward a school district in Missouri. I’d love to pretend that semester and a half never happened, but I can’t escape feeling like, on some level, I cheated my students. After all, I left because of a disagreement with the administration, not because I was a bad teacher. Those students were learning to work. An entire classroom of 10th graders became enraged when Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice turned out to have a happy ending. To me, that meant a lot.

In the month since we left Theodosia, we have pared down our wardrobes, our piles of gear, our books–boxes and boxes of them– until it fit into two backpacks. The rest of our possessions, we loaded into a U-Haul, drove to Wisconsin and threw into a mini-storage unit. A week later, we drove another 1,500 miles to Savannah. Lindsey, old as she is, barely made it, and it may have been easier for her than it was for Mollie and me.

Mark Twain wrote once that “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.” I love this quote, and I’ve been thinking about the importance of language a lot lately. We started this blog because we believe our stories can be important. We disagreed with the instructors of that intruder simulation because their words disrespected human life.

During the intruder training, one of the instructors did, in fact, come speak with us. He wanted to know what our problem was.
“Our job is to teach that words matter,” said Mollie, “and if they matter to our students then they matter most of all during a training like this.” I don’t know that the instructor quite understood what she meant, because after our conversation, the comments became more pointed, maybe even more vicious (I’ll turn that shooter’s head into a canoe, then go home and have dinner, said a local police chief), but Mollie’s words reminded me that the risks we take don’t need to be momentous. Often, the biggest risks are those that ask us to stand by our principles, and to stand by each other when things get tough, even when it hurts. I think old Sammy Clemens meant that we need to be aware of what we believe in, and more importantly, we need to know why we believe it.
In the past week, we have bagged and boxed the dog food. Sixteen USPS boxes are stacked in a closet at Tybee Island. We drove an hour into South Carolina to pick up a brand the puppies like. Their food weighs more than ours, and it might be healthier. It might be more expensive too.

We’ve weighed our packs. They weigh too much. We took a training hike down the beach, the flattest stretch of ground we’ll walk for the next six months. We threw in a couple job applications for the fall, paid for healthcare, bought those last minute supplies. We’ve checked and re-checked our gear. We’ve debated methods of storage, argued logistics until our heads hurt so bad we can’t sleep at night. We’ve been trying hard to move forward, to forgive and forget.
Dad helped. Back in February, when we called to say we were headed to Appalachia for a long walk, he replied, “I guess I’ll have to make you a walking stick.”

Dad redoubled his efforts to finish the project in time for our revised start date, and now I have an extra four pounds of weight to carry in my pack. But you can’t put a price on a thing like this.

He molded it from an old shovel handle– old-growth ash, according to the sticker he shellacked into the design. On the top he carved a caricature of America’s greatest literary figure. He tooled in the signature white mustache, used a nail to secure the cigar; I don’t know if Mark Twain ever wore glasses, but the guy on top of my hiking staff has a very fine-looking pair of copper spectacles to take in those long views from the ridge tops.

He’s a special guy, that father of mine. I guess he knew that I needed to write about my anger in order to make sense of it and I guess he knew the figurehead would help. It has. I’ve remembered that it’s okay to be a little unique, especially since I now have a bust of Mark Twain as my walking stick handle. Sure it weighs a lot, but I think that in the end, this walking stick will help me lighten the load.

And if that doesn’t work, I’ll just slip some of the dog food into Mollie’s pack.

Mr. Twain visits the beach

Introduction: A Rucksack Revolution?

 

A month ago, we were school teachers in rural Missouri, planning a summer trip. As in, a trip that would take three months to complete. We have a habit of dreaming big. “We’ll bicycle the southeastern coast of Africa!” John suggested. Days later, an article popped up in the news: the Mozambique opposition party was kidnapping foreigners and killing police officers. “Maybe not the right time,” I said.

Our next trip jumped continents, but stuck with the bicycle: “We’ll circumnavigate the Black Sea!” I warmed quickly to this notion, remembering a brief trip to Ukraine in the spring of 2006. We would fly into Kiev and take the train to the coast. Then Putin felt a hankering for the fresh sea air, and as the Ukrainians argued in their capital city, the Russians annexed Crimea. Enough said.

One day after school, we hatched a new plan. “We have dogs,” I said to John. He looked at me, a little disappointed. “Instead of worrying about what to do with them while we’re on some trip, why don’t we plan an adventure they can participate in?” Thus was born our plan to hike the entire Appalachian Trail. With the dogs.

How, you might ask, could two schoolteachers begin a thru-hike in April? Don’t most schools get out in June? It’s a long story. A complicated story. Strangely, suddenly, too simply, we were fired. 

When the state of Missouri passed a mandate requiring all school district employees to attend a “training” that simulated Sandy Hook-style shootings, we were skeptical. When the instructor of the training we attended encouraged us to use a fire extinguisher to bash a child’s head until “his brains ooze out onto the floor,” we objected. Rather than listen to our objections – objections, as it turned out, that we shared with plenty of Missouri teachers – the administration of our rural school district accused us of staging a public protest and asked us to leave. We left, in great haste. 

For both of us, this job had symbolized a transition: we were committed to each other, and because of this commitment, security sounded attractive. (Why?! What is this impulse?) We left Alaska hopeful and in love, and we had failed. We left Missouri confused and angry. We travelled from one set of parents to the other and, despite their support, couldn’t shake the feeling that we had become strangers inside a society that was supposed to be familiar. 

When Bill Bryson returned from a decade overseas, he hiked the Appalachian Trail to rediscover the uniqueness of the American people. We come to the trail today wondering if we fit into said ‘American people’, or if this culture is one that excludes us. Really, we want to rediscover hope, to be reminded of the goodness of humanity. To this end, we will join some 1500 thru-hikers on the way to Maine. 

Along the trail, John and I will each post about our progress. We will keep you updated on the challenges and rewards of hiking 2200 miles with a couple of amazing dogs.