The Dynamic Duo

Are you looking for a tale of adventure and derring-do? Lots of action and fatal attraction? Well……..perhaps you should pick up Treasure Island, that delightful pirate tale penned by Robert Louis Stevensen. Just watch out for that Long John Silver; he’s a bad one, and haunted my dreams, as well as my closet. (that may have been part of my all too vivid childhood imagination.) But if you want to read about UltraMom and her sister in the wilds of Maine, New Jersey and New York City, by all means continue.

Let me just start by stating that my sister, Debi, is an amazing woman. She lost her husband way too early to an aggressive melanoma cancer, but has no time to sit around feeling sorry for herself. Debi is a Registered Nurse and works in Cardiac Intensive Care at St. Luke’s in Boise, ID, where she has been given ever-increasing responsibility. She is the mom of Michael, a college freshman, and Sara, a recent college grad. Debi also maintains a large house and property, takes care of two dogs and the biggest cat I have ever seen, and has been allowing my son Johnny to stay with her as he is trying to save money and preparing for law school. And if THAT weren’t enough, she is also a heck of a lot of fun.
Sara has, since last April, been hiking the Appalachian Trail in the company of her boyfriend, Jason and his friend Ricky. They started in Georgia, and have, more or less, with a few breaks and detours, preceded north along the trail. Sara really wanted her mom to get a taste of what she had been doing for the past 6 months, and when Debi asked me if I wanted to go along I leaped at the chance!
We, (mostly she) spent long hours preparing for spending a week camping and hiking in the “wilderness”. Debi became a member of REI’s Frequent “Flyer” Club. (Okay, no flying, actually, but a lot of buying). Per Sara’s instructions, we were each outfitted with light-weight long johns and several other “wicking” layers (translate: expensive and NO cotton), hiking shoes, (NOT boots:too heavy and tiring), gloves, hats, hiking poles, water bags and backpacks. Even our underwear was specially purchased with an eye towards material, comfort and weight. Of course there were also the sleeping bags and tent.
To prepare, I read Bill Bryon’s oh so popular and mildly definitive book “A Walk in the Woods”, not to be confused (as I did when I requested it at the local library) with “Into the Woods” by Jon Krakauer, a tale of a young lad who perished in the Alaskan wilderness, but I digress. Bill Bryson’s book is about the AT, as we insiders refer to the trail. Debi kept getting mixed up and calling it the AP….Appalachian Path?
The interesting thing is, even though this book is probably the most widely read account of hiking the AT, Mr. Bryson actually walked very little of it, at least as a thru hiker. But it is vastly entertaining (as I was reading the first couple of chapters, I was alone and laughing out loud), and chock full of information about the history, statistics and topography of the trail. The best parts were when he was thru hiking with his pal, Katz, (first name Stephen), who, the first day of the hike, jettisoned most of the contents of his pack to lighten the load. As the title of the book implies, Mr. Bryson thought of his upcoming adventure as a “walk in the woods”. This is exactly as I had always envisioned the AT. The trail would be wide and well cleared. There would be “amenities” every mile or so. Far from a wilderness experience, you would have to fight for space among the hordes of other hikers on this over publicized, over utilized path thru low lying hills that couldn’t begin to compare to the peaks in the western U.S……………as it turns out, though there may be some truth in this, most of my assumptions were far from the mark.
The Appalachian Trail is roughly 2,160 miles from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine. Benton MacKaye envisioned the trail in a 1921 magazine article, and he organized and convened the first Appalachian Trail Conference in 1925 in Washington D.C. This organization still maintains large portions of the trail along with various shelters. The trail is widely varied; it encompasses quite a few mountains, (low by Rocky Mountain standards, but substantial enough if you are walking up and down them with a large pack on your back), some rivers & streams, some national and state parks, and sections quite near busy highways. But you can pick up this factual, boring stuff anywhere. What you are looking for is an “insider” viewpoint; am I right or am I right?
This was “THE PLAN”. Debi and I fly out of Boise, ID, and arrive in Newark, NJ later that evening, to be met by our brother, Dan & lovely wife Mary. Very early the next morning, we would be driven to the train station to catch a ride to Boston. From there, a bus to Portland, Maine where Sara and Jason would be waiting to escort us back to the AT and our week of hiking, backpacking, camping and a promised weight loss of at least 10 lbs. each. That part all went as planned. We saw two movies on the plane, and one on the Concord bus, and just generally had a great time anticipating and consuming the delicious and varied lunch that Dan and Mary had provided for our arduous journey. We spent endless time trying to concoct our “trail names.” Most people that hike the trail for any length of time pick up a trail name, such as Scarecrow, Cliff Dancer or Lobo; the rules, as we heard them, are that you really aren’t supposed to make up your own trail name, and that you have the option of vetoing up to 3 names suggested for you. Debi and I made a list of trail names we would find acceptable (platypus, armadillo, rocky and bullwinkle, etc.) but we really liked “Cougar” and “Panther” and decided we would try to nudge the trail naming in that direction.

To be continued