Before entering Shenandoah, Sug talked us all into making another unscheduled stop in Waynesboro, Va. It was a fairly tough negotiation with E and I pointing out that we had just stayed the night at the Dutch Haus, Pilgrim and Sug countering with an offer to pay for a motel, and E and I immediately agreeing. Checking our guidebook, we learned that Waynesboro is the home of the Fishburne Military School, an imposing campus in the middle of town, and, more interesting to us, an all you can eat pancake house. After checking into a Days Inn that by any other traveler’s standards might rate a disappointed “it’s just a place to sleep” but elicited cheers from me for the tiny complimentary bottles of shampoo and lotion, we headed into town. Because we had just resupplied and done laundry at the Dutch Haus, after stuffing ourselves on pancakes, we were at a loss for what to do and resorted to loitering in front of the post office trying to look menacing to the straight-laced military students.

“Hey!” E said suddenly. I could practically see the light bulb go on over her head. “Let’s get drunk!”

And so we did.

Armed with a case of beer and an extensive collective catalogue of drinking games, we took to our room at the Days Inn on a mission. Several hours later, having drank enough beer and eaten enough pizza for two men, I found myself in the bathroom on the phone with Kevin.

“I’m so glad you’re having fun. I miss you.” Kevin told me, sounding like he meant both things.

Pilgrim peeked his head in and I could hear E and Sug’s laughter from the other room. “Hey, sorry, I need to make a quick call whenever you’re done and then I volunteered us to go get more beer.” He whispered, shutting the door.

I finished up my call and handed off the phone and privacy of the bathroom to Pilgrim. Kevin and I had talked regularly since his visit in Tennessee and there was almost always a package or sweet letter waiting from him at post office drops. I was relieved that things seemed like they were finally back to normal. Ten minutes later, a suddenly somber Pilgrim and I walked the two blocks to the gas station for beer none of us needed.

“Who were you talking to? Everything okay?” I asked, the alcohol making me think it was okay to pry into life of someone usually so private.

“Yeah, it’s dumb. Just this girl.” He mumbled. And then, apropos of nothing, “I know you guys probably think I’m just this small town guy.”

“What are you talking about?” I was genuinely thrown. I saw Pilgrim as smart, artistic, complex; the opposite of what I thought he meant by “small town.” Not knowing what else to say, I blurted, “Dude, I’m from Ohio!”

Pilgrim looked at me for a second and we both laughed and moved on to some other beer-fueled topic. But as I hiked the next day, the relative easiness of the Shenandoah trails making it possible to ponder something more than “not another fucking climb,” his remark stuck with me. It struck me that my decision to hike the trail, although I had never articulated it, was in part because I wasn’t happy with who I felt I’d become. At some point, maybe during college, I’d begun thinking of myself as dull, directionless, as someone with nothing much to add. I looked at E, who had (and has) such a spark about her that people couldn’t help but instantly love her, and I wished for some of her vibrance instead of feeling like the dumpy sidekick. As I hiked through a non-descript patch of woods, it occurred to me, honestly for the first time, that maybe like Pilgrim, my self-image was skewed. I was, after all, the same person who had, on a whim, decided to take stand-up comedy classes, and had spent the last several months I’d lived in Chicago performing at comedy open mics around the city. I resolved to spend more time thinking about who I was, who I wanted to be and about how to go be her.

It was only a little over a week since the day outside of Pearisburg when Pilgrim woke up refusing to hike and E, See Blue and I had set off into the fog without them, but the four of us greeted each other like it had been six months. I had halfway convinced myself that we would never see them again and yet there they were, as if we had planned all along to meet up outside of the post office in this tiny Virginia town.

Conscious of Earl and Flashback waiting for us in the car, E told the guys to meet us at the Dutch Haus when they finished their errands. Within ten minutes of arriving at the bed and breakfast, E and I were shown to our room, given fluffy bathrobes and told to leave our laundry outside the door of our room, “Don’t you worry, we’ll take care of it…we’ve seen worse!”

I had just finished the long, hot shower I had day dreamed of when I saw Pilgrim and Sug walking towards the house. I opened the window and shouted down at them, “I’M BLOW DRYING MY HAIR!” They gave me a confused thumbs up, obviously not as taken with the novelty of a hair dryer as I was. On the trail I would often go a week without combing, let alone washing my hair, so the hair dryer was a luxury.

E and I met the guys on the front stoop and learned that they come into town about eight miles behind where we had stopped for the day. They decided that instead of staying the night at the Dutch Haus with us, they would go back out onto the trail that evening, hike those eight miles so that we would all be starting out at the same place the next morning.

“What have you been up to since we saw you last?” I asked. “I thought you guys would have caught us days ago. We were going pretty slow.”

It turned out that hours after we’d left them in Pearisburg, Stitch, a guy we’d hiked with on and off in North Carolina showed up at the shelter with another thru-hiker, Ben. Stitch and Ben were going into Blacksburg, Virginia the next day so that Ben could get off the trail to visit his girlfriend in Madison, Wisconsin, and Sug and Pilgrim decided to go with them. The four of them drank wine, ate cheese and chatted up Virginia Tech girls all day.

E looked at them with fake anger. “So while we hiked in the snow that day, you guys were lounging on some college quad? That’s fucked up!”

“Yeah,” Sug said, “and it was awesome! You guys would really like Ben.”

Pilgrim chimed in, “He’s kinda like me, but super laid back.”

“So…not like you at all?” I joked.

Pilgrim told us that Ben and Stitch had been hiking thirty-mile days, something none of us had attempted yet.

“Yeah, Ben doesn’t hike super fast or use hiking poles, he just puts his head down and hikes all day. He said he’s lost like 30 pounds since starting.”

I pictured a friendly, short, chubby guy with a hiker’s beard and decided I’d probably like him, but knew that since he was leaving the trail for a week to visit his girlfriend, we’d most likely never meet.

“Since we took those two days off, we’ve had to hike big miles to catch up to you guys.” Sug told us. In the past when we’d hiked with them, we’d never really conceded that we were staying together as a group on purpose and so it surprised and pleased me to know that they had worked to catch up with us. I felt like our friendships weren’t as fleeting as many on the trail had turned out to be.

After an hour, the guys took off for their night time hiking adventure, and E and I went inside, still in our fluffy bathrobes, to eat dinner with Flashback. We had a lovely dinner and I was sad to learn that this would be the last time we saw him, because he was leaving the next day to go home to his family. While we drank wine and cheers’ed Flashback’s birthday and successful section hike, I thought about all the snapshot relationships I’d collected on our hike and was even more grateful that Sug and Pilgrim had caught up to us.

The next morning, after finding our freshly laundered clothes sitting outside our door and eating a delicious home cooked breakfast, E and I waved goodbye to Flashback and Earl from the trailhead. We found the shelter where Pilgrim and Sug had slept and woke them up, deciding to end the day about 25 miles up the trail, just on the outskirts of Shenandoah National Park. This part of the AT in Virginia defied the picture of an easy, downward slope that I’d carried with me through the earlier states. The day started out with a rough climb up a mountain that had three false summits. False summits are as annoying as they sound, just when I’d think I was at the peak of the mountain, I’d turn a corner and see that there was more climbing to do. It had been awhile since E and I had hiked over 20 miles in a day and by the last four we were trying to find anything to distract us from the pain our bodies were experiencing from the constant ups and downs. My walkman was, yet again, broken, so E would sing out loud as she listened to a tape and I would sing along. We discovered that “Southern Cross” was a great motivator, and sang “How many times I have fa-allen!” at the tops of our lungs as many times as it took us to reach the shelter.

The four of us had the shelter to ourselves that night. Pilgrim introduced the concept of “A.T. gym”, reasoning that while our legs were getting super strong, our arms and abs were not, so we should do sit-ups and pushups at night. “Let’s just get super ripped!” Even though everyone was exhausted from the day, we all joined in.

“Hey, should we hike through Shenandoah together?” I asked at one point, trying to seem casual, but still surprisingly shy to ask other hikers, even ones who had become true friends, to adjust their schedules to ours.

“Of course.” Sug answered without hesitation.

“Yeah. Cool.” I said, as if I had completely expected his answer.

The next day, the four of us set out for Shenandoah National park, expecting to see the Blue Ridge parkway, crowds, wildlife; but not knowing that this would be one of the most eventful sections of our hike.

To be continued…

“And you’re, like, a fucking asshole.” I laughed and shoved E’s shoulder, causing her to tip over, making us both laugh harder.

The next morning we were slowly gathering our things, long past autopilot on our morning routine, when E announced that it was Easter.

I hadn’t even realized it was a Sunday before E said it, and now I wondered out loud if we should somehow mark the occasion. It seemed important, not out of religious obligation, but as a way to inject some normalcy into lives that were becoming more detached from the “real world” every day. I had gone to church as a kid, and had tried on variations of Christianity over the years, most notably my stint as a “kinda Catholic” during my years at Chaminde-Julienne Catholic High School, but nothing had really taken. And while E had grown up Catholic, she wasn’t overly concerned with the ceremony of faith. During her time at a Jesuit university and for the years afterward she had focused her energy on social justice, working to make good in her community and the world, but she didn’t care whether she made it to church on Sunday. It is one of the things I admire most about E, she is a person of action, not pretense.

“I could hide your candy bars around the shelter like an Easter egg hunt, if that will make you feel better.” E teased as we headed out.

The day was pleasant and we spent the morning hiking together, talking about faith and telling stories about Easters growing up. I told her about how I was 11 before I finally realized there was no Santa Claus and that while I sat crying to my mom (who I now know was thinking “How can this kid be so smart and yet so dumb?”) about my late revelation, I looked up at her and said, “wait! Does that mean there’s no Easter Bunny, too?”

Around lunch time we walked down to a shelter for water and a rest, and ran into Flashback, a section hiker we’d been hiking around for a couple of weeks. Section hikers generally hike the entire trail in several hiking seasons and Flashback was out for a month, completing as much as he could before he had to get back to a job and his wife and children. E and I both really liked him, having felt an instant kinship the day we found him climbing back up a ravine after tumbling off the trail because he was lost in thought. He handled himself with much more humor than I had the time I’d lost my footing going down a steep trail and then cried to E that I had “fallen off the fucking mountain!”

We hadn’t seen Flashback in a couple of days and it turned out he was being slack packed by the owners of a bed and breakfast right off the trail called the Dutch Haus. He told us that the owner was picking him up at the end of the night, and that it was not only Easter, but also his birthday, so he thought we should stay the night at the Dutch Haus and celebrate with him. E and I agreed to go and were secretly relieved when he insisted that it be his treat. By thru-hiker standards, we had both saved a decent amount of money to hike the trail, but the Dutch Haus, at a mere $25 per hiker a night, seemed beyond what we should be spending.

The rest of the day flew by, even though the hiking was challenging. Flashback told us that the Dutch Haus stay included a home cooked breakfast and dinner as well as complimentary laundry. We completed 22 miles and were picked up by the B&B owner, Earl, on a road a few miles north of the Priest mountain summit. As he drove, E asked Earl about how he and his wife had come to open the B&B in tiny Montebello, Virginia and I looked out the window at the passing landscape, thinking of how amazing a hot shower would feel.

Earl had just driven into town when I saw something out of the corner of my eye.

“STOP!” I yelled instinctively, and then seeing a startled Earl, “Sorry, do you mind waiting here for just a minute?”

E saw what I did and screamed with delight.

Sitting outside the post office were Pilgrim and Sugar High.

To be continued…

Five days later, E and I sat alone together in a shelter for only the second time since the beginning of the trail.

“It’s going to be weird sleeping without See Blue mumble-singing Blue Oyster Cult all night.” E said, throwing a pebble at a tree. We both felt guilty. The day before, caught in a sudden shower of freezing rain, E and I had stopped for the day short of our planned destination without telling See Blue. We had no idea how far ahead of us See Blue was, or when we’d see him again.

“You think he’ll wait for us to catch up ahead?” I asked.

“Like we’ve waited for Pilgrim and Sug? Or Mike?”

“Right.” Separating from See Blue was another illustration of how upredictable trail life was. Doing your own thing was part of the hiker culture; you had to hike your own hike (an oft repeated phrase among hikers, so much so that the acronym HYOH was frequently used in its place). When Mike, and then Sugar High and Pilgrim had decided to stay behind, E and I had hiked on, not willing to change our schedule, and I doubted that See Blue would alter his full speed ahead mentality for us despite how close we’d become.

The three of us had spent the five days since the sunny afternoon on McAfee’s Knob hiking through the rolling mountains of Virginia. After the dramatic peaks and gaps of Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina, Virginia’s landscape was a welcome change. Instead of hiking up and down mountains, in Virginia the trail largely follows ridgelines and meanders through pastures. Thru-hikers spend more trail miles in Virginia then any other state, almost 550 miles. In the early days, we would long to be in Virginia, joking that it must be like a paved highway all the way to West Virginia (it wasn’t). It was a milestone to get to Virginia, and would be a milestone to get through it.

During those days together, See Blue, E and I did an equal amount of hiking North and exploring Southern Virginia trail towns. We resupplied at a gas station in Daleville, Virginia and caught a hitch in the back of a pick-up truck sporting multiple confederate flag stickers into the charming town of Buchanan where the owner of a Christian bookstore/50’s café bought us all lunch. We spent a night watching hours of Friends reruns in a shitty motel in Glasgow, a town notable only for the dozen full-sized fiberglass dinosaurs stationed throughout the rundown town center. We had also hiked almost 100 miles and had scaled the last peak over 4000 feet until we reached New Hampshire. See Blue introduced cocktail hour to our routine, surprising us by packing in wine and marshmallows one night, prompting E and I to stock our own “mini-bars” with little bottles of liquor. E and I discovered that See Blue slept in the nude (“you gotta let your shit breathe, girls”), a revelation that amused us to no end, as did his tendency to hum out loud to whatever heavy metal song was playing on his walkman. The three of us had settled into a comfortable trio, happily dividing camp chores, picking up the slack for whoever was feeling especially tired on a given day.

Now, See Blue miles ahead, E and I both grew silent as we sat, legs swinging from the edge of the shelter, tossing rocks at the trees and looking out into the woods that had become our home.

“Wow. We’re, like, alone.” I mused.

E stared at me for a full ten seconds and then sides of her mouth curled into a smile and her nostrils flared with suppressed laughter.

“Wow. You’re, like, fucking deep.”

To be continued…

Two nights after the snow, I lay on a cot in the garage of a man I didn’t know, staring up at a poster of a naked woman draped over a motorcycle. I took a sip of my Natty Light and smiled, content for the first time since before the sickness and mess of Pearisburg.

The day after we left Sug and Pilgrim in their sleeping bags vowing not to hike, E and I had made our way, slipping and stumbling, through three inches of slushy snow covering a ridge trail made of rock. I fought to stay upright, my soaked boots rubbing against my once again open heel wounds. My poles slipped constantly from my sock covered hands (I had learned in our first week that only my wool socks kept my hands from stiffening with the cold). Every so often we would see “this sucks” written in the snow, an encouraging message from See Blue, walking a few minutes ahead of us. And even though the snow melted by the end of that day, “this sucks” was still the thought most frequently running through my head when we walked up to the Four Pines hostel; home to the garage cots, naked lady posters, Natty Lights and Joe Mitchell, one of the nicest hostel owners we would meet on the trail.

“Which one of you is E?” Joe had asked us when we arrived. There were few women on the trail and so his guess that one of us was E was not a stretch. He was leading us to the back of his sizable property, which included a house and dirt bike track situated a few minutes walk down a road that intersected the trail, “Your mom called, wanted to make sure you got this package…it’s insulin and I understand how important that is.”

It turned out Joe was also a diabetic and had worried about E ever since her Mom had called wanting to know if we’d made it there yet. Her mom knew we’d planned to stay at Four Pines because every couple of weeks, we tried to update our families and friends about what towns and hostels we thought we might stop at. That way, they could send supplies, like E’s insulin, or luxuries, like books or cds. My Dad made a habit of sending a book with a $20 bill as a bookmark and a box of band aids for my feet to every place we stopped. Kevin always sent cooking fuel and sweet letters, along with candy or cheetos. My Mom wrote me encouraging notes, E’s brother sent mix tapes, and my brother sent brownies. Every post office or hostel was like a mini-christmas, a connection to home, a reminder that people other than us were invested in our journey.

“How about a beer, ladies?” We had entered a huge garage housing ten cots, a card table, radio, shower and toilet in one corner, and a refrigerator filled with beer.

“It’s not much…” Joe trailed off.

“It’s perfect.” E and I agreed, meaning it.

We talked to Joe and drank beers while his kids zoomed around on four wheelers outside. Joe told us that we were some of the first thru-hikers he’d seen, but that later in the season the garage would be filled past capacity every night.

After See Blue arrived and we’d all taken showers, Joe offered us the keys to his old pick-up truck so that we could drive into town, three across in the front seat, to eat at a nice family style restaurant called the Home Place. For several hours, we feasted on $10 all you can eat fried chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans, corn, biscuits, coleslaw, and peach cobbler, stopping only to grunt about how good the food was or to ask the patient waitress for more.

Laying in our cots the next morning, bellies still full, E and I re-evaluated our planned mileage. We’d been hiking 20-plus miles days fairly consistently, but we were both tired, so decided to cut back on the long days for a bit while we let our bodies heal. Besides, we both hoped that our low mileage would give Sug and Pilgrim the chance to catch up. We hadn’t talked about it much because the fluid nature of the trail meant that people came and went all the time, we had learned that after we lost Mike, but to me, our little group felt incomplete.

As we rearranged our miles (“Okay…so we can do 17 instead of 20 today, and 18 tomorrow, not 22. We’ll just make those miles up in a week or so.”), I experienced a mental shift. I realized that I’d been dreading hiking. Every day for awhile, I’d gone to sleep worrying about the next day’s itinerary, and I’d woken up dreading what was to come. Just remembering that I had control over how far we were going and where we’d stop, and that I could say “look, I need a break,” made me feel like what we were doing was a choice, not a job.

And when my mental fog lifted, thankfully, so did the weather. We left Four Pines and Joe that morning, comfortable in our shorts and t-shirts, marveling at the cloudless sky. My body felt good, rested, healthy, probably properly nourished for the first time in weeks. We reached McAfee’s Knob, one of the trail’s most photographed overlooks around lunch time, finding it swarmed with day hikers. Until then, I hadn’t realized it was a weekend. I sat on the rock formation jutting out over rolling Virginia farmland far below, occasionally answering the questions of people curious about thru-hiking, but mostly soaking up the sunshine and I felt something I hadn’t in too long- gratitude.

The night Cara picked us up we went through the motions of town. We gorged ourselves on Chinese Buffet, made phone calls, did laundry, shopped for food. Later, the boys walked over from the hostel they were staying at to the dingy motel room E, Cara, and I shared and we all drank beer and watched as Syracuse beat Oklahoma in the NCAA championship game. Nobody mentioned how late it got, or that we had 26 miles to hike the next day. I needed a break, mentally and physically, from the trail and it was nice to imagine us as just a bunch of friends watching a basketball game, even for a few hours.

I spent most of the night alternately trying suppress my coughs and tossing from the weirdness of being in a bed as opposed to a shelter floor. At one point in the night, E woke up from a dream laughing uncontrollably, having no idea why. Between my exhaustion and everyone else’s stalling, we didn’t start hiking until after 10am the next morning. Cara was slack packing us, so we left our packs in the hotel room and she drove us back to where she had picked us up the day before and we were to hike the 26 miles to Pearisburg and spend another night there before saying goodbye and hiking on. The day out of Pearisburg was the day we all learned that slack packing could be both a blessing and a curse. It is amazing how light and fast you feel hiking with nothing when you are used to 40 pounds on your back. But what we chose to ignore with our late night and late start was that we still had a marathon’s length of mountains to climb before the end of the day.

Cara hiked the first three miles with E and I, listening sympathetically as we complained, assuring us that what we were going through was completely normal.

“As crappy as it could be, Chris and I still talk about the trail at least once a day, even four years later. And I know we’d both love to be out here with you guys.” Cara told us.

So we felt good as we waved goodbye, encouraged by her enthusiasm. We felt good until about noon, when it started to pour and we realized we still had twenty miles to hike. And then everything fell apart. Objectively, there was no reason this day should feel harder than any other, especially because we weren’t carrying packs. But the collective weariness had taken hold and every mile felt like two, and the cold rain soaked me to the core.

I started crying as I stood at the base of what turned out to be the last big climb of the day, seriously believing that I couldn’t keep hiking. I cried when E and I reached the motel and she turned to me with tears in her eyes, saying “Let’s never talk about this day again.” I stopped crying long enough to eat almost an entire pizza, but started crying again as I lay in bed, once again unable to sleep. I cried as we stood at the hostel with the boys the next morning and waved goodbye to Cara.

I was standing outside trying to compose myself enough to hike when See Blue came and stood beside me.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

I sighed. “Nothing.” I said, shaking my head and wiping my face.

“Yeah.” He agreed, and lifted up my pack and placed it on my shoulders.

It was late when we finally got going. We had discovered a scale in the hostel and took turns weighing ourselves and our packs. In the weeks since we started hiking, I had lost over 20 pounds. We decided to hike only six miles that day. We needed a bit of an easy day, but we all decided it would be best to get ourselves clear of Pearisburg and the dark cloud that seemed to sit over it for us. I listened to Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” over and over as I crossed a river and willed myself up the mountain. As soon as Dylan sang his last “he coulda been the champion of the world”, I would rewind to “pistol shots ring out in the bar room night…” and start the story again. Sometimes it was the most random thing that got me through a day. After at least eight times through, I came upon Pilgrim sitting on a large rock staring out to the fields below.

I took off my pack and sat down beside him. “You okay?”

He sighed. “I’m just so fucking tired. We’re not even a 1/3 of the way finished this fucking trail and I’m already so fucking tired.”

I nodded, but didn’t say anything. I couldn’t let myself voice the doubts I constantly carried with me, especially now, after the sickness and weather and injury and, as Pilgrim had put it, the being so fucking tired all the time. My drive to keep putting one foot in front of the other was so fragile that saying anything out loud might mean I wouldn’t make it, and more than anything; more than sleep and warmth and hot meals; I desperately wanted to be a person who could finish this thing I had started. Even though I felt weak and weary, I wanted to be strong and determined.

So I listened as Pilgrim talked. Like me, he was wrapped up in his own struggles and worries. Eventually, we moved on to talk for almost an hour about our families and our ideas of what life would be like when we got home until we fell into a companionable silence.

“Should we leave the rock?” I asked after a few minutes.

“UGHHHHHHHHHH!” Pilgrim yelled in exaggerated frustration, grinning manically and hauling his pack over his shoulders.

In minutes, we were at the shelter with the others, boiling water for dinner, trying to stay warm in our sleeping bags.

The next morning the fog hung in front of us so thick that I could barely make out See Blue’s figure 20 feet after he set out from the shelter. Pilgrim hadn’t moved all morning despite the flurry of activity as the rest of us went through our morning routine- pee, pack, eat, hike. Sug just shrugged when we asked what was going on. As E and I were grabbing our hiking poles, Pilgrim stuck his head out of his sleeping bag, looked out at the fog and proclaimed, “I’m not fucking hiking today.” It was what I wanted to say many mornings, but had never considered that it might actually be an option.

“I guess we’re not going anywhere today.” Sug shrugged again, obviously used to his friend’s mood swings. “We’ll catch up.”

Looking over my shoulder as Sug climbed back into his sleeping back, I worried about losing our friends, worried that Pilgrim’s impulsive decision not to hike might change everything. As I walked, the fog turned to pounding rain, which turned to driving sleet.

“What else are you going to do?!” I screamed to the sky, not giving a thought to how ridiculous I must look. “Seriously, Mother Nature! What the hell else are you going to do?!”

Two minutes later, as I reached the shelter where See Blue and E sat huddled in their bags, I got my answer. The sleet suddenly and silently turned to snow.

To be continued…

The next morning I walked into the motel room, coffee in hand, and was almost knocked out by the stench.

“Jesus, is this what we smell like to other people?” Then, noticing E on the phone, I mouthed, “Oh, sorry….”

I propped the door open as E hung up. “Dude, that was my sister, she’s going to meet us in Perrisburg and slack pack us!”

Having Cara visit was the best of both worlds- having the comfort of home combined with someone who understood exactly what we were going through. For sisters born four years apart, Cara and E are exceptionally close. Cara had served as a de facto older sister for me, too, and for years E and I had followed in her footsteps- watching as she made bold decisions about her life. On the surface, Cara is sweet, thoughtful, caring. And she is all of those things, but underneath lies a strong, reckless streak that I’ve always envied and tried to emulate. Hiking the A.T. four years after she had, we were now literally following the path she blazed for us.

“Awesome!”

But 3 days later, it was a cheerless bunch of hikers that Cara picked up in a diner parking lot on a country road 26 miles outside of Perrisburg, Virginia. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what happened that left us at what we would remember as one of our lowest points on the trail (so low, in fact, that E sent a message seven years later saying “P day tomorrow…Perrisburg”, to which Pilgrim responded “sigh (repeat indefinitely)”). The first day out of Atkins started with all of us well-rested, clean, upbeat. We spent an hour during lunch lounging in the sun and dipping our feet in a nearby stream. But then, as we finally got back to hiking, E mentioned that her knee felt stiff from sitting around so long and was “kinda bothering” her. I could tell, from her labored gait and the tears that sat at the corners of her eyes when we finally reached the shelter that night, “kinda” was an understatement.

“Where’s the water?” I asked an unusually subdued Pilgrim and Sug, who had arrived at the shelter well before we had. See Blue was already laying in his sleeping bag, back turned toward the wall, humming to the Blue Oyster Cult blaring in his headphones.

The first thing we did at the end of each hike was re-fill our usually empty water supply. It was the last chore before we could rest for the night, and we wanted to get it over with as soon as we could. E and I both carried a one liter Nalgene bottle that filled at night for cooking and rehydrating, and a 2 liter Platypus water bag fitted with a drinking tube that clipped on our pack for hands free drinking while hiking (after puncturing her water bag during our hike of the Long Trail, E declared that she was going to “buy myself a yellow ‘pus”, a quote Cara and I never let her live down). Shelters are usually built within a tenth of a mile from a water source, which is why E and I simultaneously groaned when a woman I’d never seen told us this one was almost a half mile away. The last thing we wanted, at the end of a hard day, was to walk more.

“Have fun!” she yelled after us. I caught Sug’s eyes mid roll.

“I don’t think she means that.” E mumbled.

The woman, and her male companion, turned out to be former thru-hikers, usually a welcome addition. People who hike the trail tend to feel an intense connection with it and those who come after them, and were known to be the bearers of all sorts of “trail magic”- beers left in streams, bags of Little Debbies tied to a high tree branch in the middle of the woods, offers to stay in their homes. These two, however, seemed to revel in discouraging us; telling us every negative detail of their hike several years earlier.

“I got bone spurs so badly, I can barely hike now. You’ll probably get them, too, what with those boots you’re wearing.” The woman said, nodding in my direction.

“Oh, and the bears were so bad our year. I bet they are even worse now.”

And in the morning, as we prepared to leave in the pouring rain, “You better watch that ridge you’re walking today, it’s full of iron and you might get struck by lightning. Two people got struck the year we hiked.”

“I would rather be struck by lightning than stay here,” said See Blue under his breath, taking off his headphones for the first time since we’d arrived.

Though we tried to shake it off, it was as if the wear of the last month had formed a crack, allowing the couple’s negativity to seep in. The rain soaked us through and over the next day both Pilgrim and I came down with wicked sinus infections. We would lay in the shelters, neither of us able to sleep, trying and failing to suppress our coughing and blowing.

On the second day, I woke up unable to breathe. Thankfully, I found out we would hike past a road crossing with a nearby grocery where I could stock up on decongestant. I was so focused on getting medicine that I nearly passed by a cooler full of sodas in the middle of the trail. I stopped to open the lid, but as I read note taped to the top, I felt as though I’d been punched in the stomach.

“In memory of Ted “Soleman” Anderson”, the note read in bold letters.

Before I began my hike, in an effort to prepare myself as much as I could while sitting in front of a computer 9 hours a day, I joined an online group of potential AT hikers. People discussed their start dates, the gear they wanted to bring, their hopes and fears about embarking on a five to six month walk in the woods. One of the leaders of the group was a guy who called himself Soleman. Hiking the AT was one of Soleman’s lifelong dreams, and his enthusiasm for the trail was contagious. He lived only a few hours away from Kevin and I in Florida, and we commiserated about trying to get in shape in our flat surroundings. In December, I wrote on the message board that I couldn’t find the lightweight camping pot I was looking for and a few minutes later I received a message from Soleman, “I’ve got two. I’ll send you my extra! No need to send money, just pay it forward.” Ted “Soleman” Anderson had died suddenly at the end of February at age 56, just a week before he was set to begin his thru-hike.

I sat on the cooler for a long time, crying for a kind man I had never met, for his family, and for his unrealized dream.

When Cara picked us up the next day, after walking miles in the cold rain, I felt a relief that only family can bring. I was hopeful that rest and a warm bed would breathe much needed life into our collectively weary bones, and give us all a renewed determination to continue on.

I was wrong.

To be continued…

“Oh, ha ha, I get it.” E said at last.

“Get what?” I asked, scanning the field of powder in front of us, and the forest beyond for any sign of the trail.

“60 degree day? A foot of snow on the ground? And now we’ve lost the trail?” she looked at our blank faces expectantly. “It’s April fools day, bitches!”

We then took turns telling “Yo mama” jokes in honor of mother nature’s twisted sense of humor while See Blue forged ahead, looking for the trail.

“Look like you’re lost.” I commanded, snapping a picture of E, Sug and Pilgrim giving their best “where the fuck are we” faces. See Blue waved us forward, having found the trail at a nearly indistinguishable break in the trees.

“How’d you find it?” Sug wondered.

“White blaze.” See Blue grunted, pointing to a nearby tree marked with a rectangle of white paint. The whole of the Appalachian Trail is marked every so often with white “blazes”, painted on trees or rocks or wooden posts, making the AT a very easy trail to follow. AT hikers get so used to blindly following these white rectangles that thru-hikers joke that at the end of their hike they’ll catch themselves following the white paint lines down the middle of a road.

The snow made walking a chore, and I spent so much of the day concentrating on following the deep footprints in front of me that I almost forgot to look for one of the unique features of that area of Virginia- wild ponies. We were stopped for lunch at a shelter on Thomas Knob, all inordinately worn out from the twelve miles we’d hiked and deciding whether to hike on or call it a day, when E spotted one, “PONY!” She rushed over to where it stood and then immediately doubled over with laughter.

“What?” I called, too tired to get up from the picnic table.

Now laughing so hard she could barely talk, she finally spat out, “This pony has the biggest…the biggest…shlong…I’ve ever seen!” and then “come take a picture!”

After confirming that the pony was indeed “hung like a horse”, we begrudgingly kept hiking, E motivating us as she usually did to stay on schedule, and as a reward that night we drank the rest of the moonshine.

The next two days were sunny and in the 70s, making me theorize that the snow had just been a fucked up side effect of the ‘shine. We hiked two 20+ mile days, deciding to push on to Atkins, Virgina on the second day in order to make it to the post office before it closed. I noticed that the five of us- See Blue, Pilgrim, Sug, E and I, were now making choices as a group- how far to go, when to stop, when to push on- rather than just randomly ending up at the same place. In college, most of my male friends had been frat boy types (and Kevin, while not a frat boy, certainly fit the mold), Sug, Pilgrim, and See Blue were unlike guys I knew, and yet their company felt completely natural and familiar. Sug and Pilgrim were like E and I’s male equivalents, all inappropriate jokes and silliness, and See Blue was like the groups’ older brother. The more I got to know them, the more I liked each one. I knew it was a precarious bond between the five of us; after all, we hadn’t seen Mike in days, but one that felt real and important nonetheless.

In Atkins, we decided to all pile into a dingy motel room just a few feet off the trail at a road crossing, where we could shower and make phone calls, rather than hiking on to another shelter. The others had made a beeline for the Dairy Queen nearby and I was putting on my sandals to follow them when I heard an angry rap at the door. I opened it to find the motel owner stomping his foot impatiently.

“I counted five of you in this room.” He yelled at me. “You have to pay extra for five in the room.”

“Whoa, buddy…there were five of us here when I checked in. The person at the desk didn’t say anything. I’m happy to pay the extra, but there’s no need to yell.” I said evenly. My calm surprised me. Although normally a laid back person, I tended to get instantly defensive and sarcastic when confronted. Maybe it was the two beautiful days I’d just spent in the woods, or maybe I was just worn out from the hiking, but I found I couldn’t summon up my normal outrage.

Later, we all sat in the room watching tv and eating our Blizzards, the door open to let in the fresh air. After spending so long outside, it felt claustrophobic to have four walls around us.

“Holy shit.” Sug yelled. ”Dog!”

“Wha…oh shit!” We looked over to see Sug coralling a large dog that had wandered into the room.

Seconds later the motel owner appeared at the door. ”Oh, sorry…come here puppy.”

“Hey. I’m not paying for that dog, too!”

To be continued…

Soon, E and Sug were awake too and marveling at the snow. The hostel, an old house maintained by a church, had no heat and so by 7 a.m. we were sitting at the diner, eating breakfast. By 10 a.m. we had checked our emails, made phone calls and played two games of Taboo. By 10:30 a.m. I was so antsy that I pushed my chair from the table where the four of us sat in bored silence and announced that “I’d be back.”

Because we went to the grocery store, post office, and laundry when we arrived in town the day before, there wasn’t anything I needed to do, but I needed to do something, so I trudged through the snow to the only thing open, the dollar store. On the two other zero days we’d taken in our five weeks on the trail, the first at E’s lake house and the second at Miss Janet’s with Kevin, maybe because they were planned, I’d been able to relax and enjoy the much needed down time. But for some reason, as I aimlessly wandered the aisles filled with plastic trinkets and past date canned goods, I couldn’t shake my restlessness. I’d grown used to the forward momentum of the trail, of never staying in one place, of every day making concrete progress towards our ultimate goal of Maine, and this day off felt more like a roadblock than a break.

After a half-hour of browsing I stepped back into the snow carrying three fun-sized bags of Cheetos and a $10 walkman. In addition to my arm band radio, which actually picked up a radio station about a quarter of the time, I also carried a portable cassette player, and one or the other was almost always on when I hiked alone. I heard comments from some hikers, mostly those out for a day or a weekend, who felt listening to anything but the sounds of nature ruined the experience. But after five weeks alone with my thoughts, I was ready for some background noise. E’s brother Brian made us a bunch of mix tapes and we carried two or three at time.

Musicians like Bob Dylan, the Flaming Lips, Snoop Dog, and Weezer, interspersed with the voices of David Sedaris, Mitch Hedberg, and Chris Rock, became the soundtrack of my hike. I walked through the woods, singing at the top of lungs “I got bitches in the living room gettin’ it on and, they aint leavin til six in the mornin’ (six in the mornin’)” or laughing out loud to Mitch Hedberg’s joke “My friend asked me if I wanted a frozen banana, and I said ‘no, but I want a regular banana later, so … yeah.’” There were times when the music seemed to be the only thing propelling me up the mountains. And when the perfect song came on at the perfect time- like Shawn Colvin’s cover of “This Must Be the Place” on the top of a cloud-covered clearing in Tennessee- the two became forever linked in my mind, so that any time I heard the song, I would be instantly transported back.

I made it back to the hostel and was greeted by E, bundled in her sleeping bag, writing in her journal with gloved hands.

“Hey, See Blue stopped by. He wants us all to go out to dinner tonight to meet Roxy.”

“Oh, cool, I’m interested to see what she’s like.” Roxy was See Blue’s girlfriend who had driven up from Raleigh, North Carolina for a visit. Roxy was See Blue’s favorite topic of discussion, and it was obvious to anyone who spent more than three minutes with him that he was smitten with her. The two of them had been holed up at the motel in town since we’d arrived, making dinner the first time we’d meet her.

Between napping, reading, and another trip to the dollar store for more Cheetos, I somehow passed the afternoon. That night, E, Sug, Pilgrim and I walked into the restaurant and were instantly greeted with hugs by a small 22 year-old woman with giant smile.

“Oh my god, you guys, I’ve heard so much about you!” Roxy squealed, and then said the thing that instantly endeared her to the thru-hikers in us, “Come on, let’s eat, I’m paying!”

We spent the evening stuffing ourselves with pasta and trading stories. Roxy entertained us with tales about she and See Blue, asked about each of our lives off the trail, and even seemed interested when we told and retold our hiking stories.

At one point I leaned over to See Blue and squeezed his arm, “She’s great.” I whispered, thinking “Why wasn’t Kevin like this?”

“I know.” See Blue answered, never once taking his eyes off her.

The snow had stopped coming down at some point that evening, and although it was still there, a full foot and a half, the next morning we all decided that we should get back on the trail. See Blue headed off first, in no mood to talk after his tearful goodbye with Roxy, and after breakfast, E and I followed his footsteps up the mountain, leaving Sug and Pilgrim at the hostel saying they’d get started after running a few errands. The hiking was slow, making the sixteen-mile day seem like at least twenty. The trees lining the trail were bent over from the weight of the snow and E and I were constantly running into branches, only to have a shelf of white powder dumped on our heads and down our backs. About two miles from the shelter, I noticed the distinctive imprint of Sug’s boots.

“There is no way they could have gotten in front of us!” E decided. But when we got to the shelter, along with Sea Blue and a thru-hiker couple named Eric and Kristy, sat a grinning Pilgrim and Sugar High.

“What the hell, dude?” I asked, completely confused.

“Yeah, we met this guy, Lonewolf, when we went to breakfast and he told us about a shortcut out of town.” Sug explained, telling how the Virginia Creeper trail, primarily used as a bike path, basically bypassed the mountain we’d spent the day climbing up and over, and cut miles off their hike. Where I had noticed Sug’s bootprints was where the Creeper met back up with the AT.

“Seriously?” I said, trying to get the last of the snow out of my soaked shirt.

“Before you get angry, we brought a present.” Pilgrim said as he pulled out a water bottle filled with pinkish liquid and handed it to me. “Peach moonshine from Lonewolf.”

Before the trail, I never would have dreamed of drinking some stranger’s homemade moonshine, but home rules no longer applied, and so I took a big gulp.

“Shit! Well…that will certainly warm you up.”

The next morning, April 1st, the snow was still on the ground, but the temperature had risen dramatically. We hiked along in the snow in t-shirts, following the footprints left by Eric and Kristy, who had left before sunrise, telling us they were being picked up by a family member at road crossing a couple miles from the shelter. We walked in a line, See Blue first, then Pilgrim, Sug, E, and me bringing up the rear. We reached a clearing and See Blue came to a sudden stop.

“The footprints stopped.” See Blue yelled back.

“Oh, this must be where Eric and Kristy got picked up.” E said.

I caught up to the others and saw beyond the footprints and tire tracks, a sea of pristine white snow, and understood the problem. We’d lost the trail.

To be continued…

The next morning I lay in my sleeping bag thinking that after a month as a thru-hiker the only thing I knew for sure about what lay ahead of me was that I couldn’t know what lay ahead of me. I could pore over elevation maps and read guide books to get a sense of the terrain, but uncontrollable factors like the weather, the state of my body, the weight of my pack, my ever-changing mood, or the company I kept, could transform a seemingly easy day into an epic one, and an insurmountable distance into a walk in the woods. So while the day before was magical, I knew I couldn’t count on the feeling carrying over, and I would have to take the day as it presented itself. And as so often happened, that day presented itself with a cold, drizzling rain, and legs that felt like tree trunks. For all the beauty of the previous day, this day’s landscape was unforgiving, a series of sharp climbs and steep descents that made my still open wounded heels sting with pain. The big group, so boisterous and carefree the night before, was that evening crammed into a too-small shelter, silent and collectively moody.

So the following day was an improvement simply because I woke with a sense of purpose. E and I had a plan – we would hike six miles to the Kincora hostel that was set several tenths of a mile from a road crossing, pick up packages waiting for us there, get a ride into town to resupply our food, and then get back on the trail for another 10 miles of hiking. We knew that some of the other thru-hikers would chose to stay at the hostel overnight, if not longer- the lure of a dry bed and hot food too much to pass up. So when E and I arrived at the cozy hostel around 10 am, we weren’t surprised to hear Nasty, Shaman, Vagabond and several others making plans to stay the night.

But then Mike took us aside and told E and I, “I’m gonna stay, too. The owner said he’d slack pack us tomorrow if we would do some trail maintenance today. Why don’t you guys stick around?”

“You know we can’t do that, Mike.” E said quietly. Mike knew that E and I were intent on sticking as close as possible to the schedule we had set for ourselves, and that we were worried about falling behind this early in the trip and not being able to summit before our schools started at the beginning of August. E and I had agreed that we would stay on course unless an irresistible opportunity or obstacle presented itself, and Kincora, while a lovely hostel, was not irresistible.

“Alright.” Mike said, turning away, “I’ll just have to catch up with you in a few days,” not mentioning how hard it could be to make up that distance.

Back on the trail after completing our errands, I thought about how tenuous the connections we made often were. We shared intense experiences with the people we met, and while friendships were instantly forged, they were also easily discarded. One of the few codes of the thru-hiker is “hike your own hike.” Everyone has their own philosophy of how to attempt a thru-hike. Some people believe you need hike every inch of the trail with your pack on, others think it’s okay to take short cuts here and there; some want to cram as many miles as they can into a day, others feel you aren’t truly experiencing the trail if you don’t take your time. To reconcile these differences, most hikers believe that if you want to do your own thing- hike the miles you want, stop when and where and how often you want- you’ve got to let everyone else do their own thing, too. Of course, like anything where strong opinions are held there are some who can’t help espousing their views, but for the most part hikers tried to be respectful of each other’s choices. Although we couldn’t forsee circumstances where it would happen, even E and I had made a pact that we would split up if it was the only way we could each finish the trail happy. So even though we had spent almost a month solid with Mike, and cared for him like a brother, when he told us he was going to stay, and we said we wanted to go, neither side protested.

We hiked for several miles along a river, passing a gushing waterfall, and then made a laborious 2000 foot climb up a flat topped mountain. From the north side of the peak we could see Wautuga lake, but it was several more miles before we finally wound our way down to it. We crossed a road to get to the lake, excited because we knew we were now close to our shelter for the night. The trail climbed away from the shoreline, and we followed a serpentine brook until I spotted the three sided structure and picnic bench. To my surprise, the shelter was empty. Sug, Pilgrim, and See Blue had left Kincora before us, and we had made plans to meet at the Wautuga lake shelter at the end of the day.

“Do you think they kept hiking?” I wondered aloud.

“That sucks, I thought they said they were stopping here.”

Both bummed that we had now lost our entire crew, we set about our evening chores in silence- unpacking sleeping bags and pads, fetching water, pulling out food bags, and setting up stoves. I was finishing the last bite of my mac and cheese with tuna when I heard a commotion coming from behind the shelter. E and I tentatively peaked our heads around the wooden side, and simultaneously shrieked.

“See Blue!!! Pilgrim! Sug! Wha…how did you get behind us? Where have you been?”

“Ladies.” came See Blue’s gravely voice. By way of explanation, he pulled two beers from his pocket and handed one to each of us, then lit a cigarette and opened a beer for himself. Pilgrim and Sug talked over each other.

“We got to the lake really early, so we hitched into town to get some beer.” Pilgrim explained.

“Yeah, but Pilgrim ate too much at the McDonalds and we had to sit around for awhile until he didn’t feel like he was going to explode.”

“Well, yeah, but then it took forever to get a hitch back,” Pilgrim retorted, and noticed me staring at the bunch of firewood sticking out of his pack. “Oh, on the way up here, we stopped to get firewood.”

“And Pilgrim jacked me in the face with a log.” Sug laughed, pointing to a small trickle of blood square between his eyes.

I giggled, “Jacked…face…log.”

“Here.” grunted See Blue, tossing Sug a beer. “That’ll fix ya.”

And like that, our spirits were back up. With a fire blazing in the fire ring, the five of us played drinking games like “would you rather” and “boxers or briefs.” Later, tipsy from the beer, smoking a bummed cigarette, I watched E trying to dry the pants she was still wearing in the fire and thought about how much I liked being around these guys.

“Thanks for showing up.” I blurted, ” We thought you’d left us.”

“Nah…we wouldn’t have done that.” See Blue soothed. I caught E’s eye, thinking that it probably wasn’t true, but that it was nice to hear anyway.

We stuck together over the next two days hiking long and challenging 23 and then 18 mile days into Damascus, Virginia. Pilgrim and Sug tried to several times to convince E and I to stick around town the next day and take a zero, but even though we’d been hiking for eight days without a break and wanted to stay with those guys, citing our schedule, we told them we couldn’t. While See Blue checked into a motel and waited for his girlfriend, Roxy, to arrive, the rest of us headed to the hostel in town and then went for dinner and drinks at a diner owned by a former thru-hiker. Like all the time we’d spent with Pilgrim and Sug, this night was fun and effortless, like hanging out with friends we’d known for years. Towards the end of the night, Pilgrim and I stood outside, giving our ears a break from the laughably bad band and doling each other small insights into our lives, I started feeling wistful that if he and Sug took a zero day while we hiked on, we might lose them like we had lost Mike.

“You sure you guys don’t want to stay tomorrow?” Pilgrim asked.

“No…but we probably shouldn’t…”

Back inside I clumsily tried to broach the subject with E, wanting to see if she would consider changing our schedule, but then abandoned the thought, convincing myself that it was wrong to mold our hike to anyone else.

I woke the next morning to Pilgrim yelling “Holy shit!”

“What the fuck, dude?” I moaned and pulled the sleeping bag up over my head.

“Not Yet, you’ve got to see this.”

“No.”

“Dude….seriously.”

“Fine.” I said, not bothering to hide my annoyance. I climbed out of my bag and trudged to the window. “Holy shit!”

And there we both stood, mouths agape, looking at the foot of snow that had magically blanketed the ground overnight and the large white flakes that showed no signs of stopping.

“Well then,” I said, after a few minutes of stunned silence, “A zero day it is.”

To be continued…

Even though we were getting back on the trail that day, none of us seemed in any hurry to get going. E and I spent the morning hanging around with Turbo, who was taking a zero day at Miss Janet’s.

“Dude, Turbo,” said E, after realizing how delightfully goofy he was. “We thought you were going to be cocky hiker boy when we heard you say your name was Turbo going into the Smokies. Like ‘look at me, I’m Turbo, I’m super fast.’”

Turbo looked up from the bursting at the seams pack that he was unsuccessfully trying to shove a big bag of Skittles into. “No! So whatsit…uhh, the name’s a joke because I’m kinda slow and, you know, I carry a huge pack.”

“Jesus, Turbo, are you really going to carry that whole bag of Skittles?” asked Sug.

“Dude, go big or go home.”

Unlike Turbo, most hikers were obsessive about how much their pack weighed. Each item that went into the pack was scrutinized for its usefulness and discarded if it wasn’t a necessity. Even needed items were altered to shave ounces- toothbrush handles got sawed off, extra straps on backpacks were cut, all food packaging was removed before it went into the pack, book chapters were torn out and left behind after being read. Some of the choices seemed ridiculous (E and I carried a deck of miniature cards instead of a full-sized deck to save weight), but the weight of the pack made such a difference in how far and long you could hike, that to us, it made perfect sense to carry only the bare minimum. With full food and water, my pack weighed between 30-35 pounds, a decent weight for most hikers. And there are some backpackers, known as ultra-lighters, who, through a system of special lightweight gear, multipurpose items, and packing only the absolute essentials can whittle their full pack weight down to 15-20 pounds. When Turbo started the trail, his pack topped 60.

Once the group of hikers heading back up the trail had piled into the back of Miss Janet’s van, someone pointed out the map of the AT taped on the ceiling.

“I put that there so that thru-hikers realize how far they still have to go- this thing’s a marathon, you know, and you guys are just at the beginning.” I placed my finger on the dot marked Erwin, TN, and each of the hiker’s eyes traveled the distance up the map to Katahdin, Maine.

“God…and here I was thinking I was a badass for hiking 350 miles.” I muttered, my eyes fixated on the more than 1,800 miles we still had to hike.

It was noon by the time Miss Janet dropped us at the same spot she had the day before, only this time we would be heading north and there would be no warm bed to sleep in at the end of the day. I said goodbye to Miss Janet, and started up the trail. The melancholy from Kevin’s departure hung over me as I lugged my abnormally heavy pack on the steep climb up to Roan Mountain. I tried not to dwell on the negatives of the visit, but I couldn’t help but feel unsettled. During the day while I hiked, I replayed the weekend, chiding myself for not being more understanding to the situation I had put Kevin in and resolved to be more attentive.

It was already dark when I reached the shelter, and I was in no mood to talk. Luckily, the large group we were traveling with now made it hard to spend much time in my own head. In addition to Pilgrim and Sug, we were keeping pace with a couple of stoners- Nasty and Shaman, an old hippie named Vagabond, Firewood, and a sweet, devoutly Christian couple called Mawee and Pawee. E told me that Mike had pushed on to the next shelter with See Blue. We both agreed that it was for the best. From the minute we arrived at Miss Janet’s three days earlier, Mike had barely spoken to either E or I.

“He’s probably sick of us. We have been together every day for the last month.” E whispered once we were tucked in our sleeping bags.

“Well, I’m certainly sick of him.” I retorted. “He’s acting like…like…”

“Like a 20 year old boy?”

“Well…yeah.” I conceded. “Ugh, I guess he just needs to be around a little testosterone, huh?”

Since our second day on the trail, the three of us had been a team, and not that E or I would admit it, but both of us were hurt by Mike’s disappearance.

By the next morning, my mood had improved. The sun was shining and no one was in a hurry to get on the trail. I’d never been a morning person, and I always resisted the rush to get out of the shelter in the mornings (but I always did it because the other option was to sit around shivering). We took our time eating breakfast and re-packing out bags, and I finally got a chance to take in the view that I had missed by arriving after sundown the night before. E, Sug, Pilgrim and I started our day hiking together, falling into an easy banter, talking about anything and nothing, posing questions like the hiker favorite “what would be your perfect meal?” Any angst over Kevin or Mike had vanished and I felt a giddy excitement to be on the trail. We spent the day hiking over a series of grassy balds, allowing unobstructed views of the mountain ranges that surrounded us. At one point E and I stood at one peak and could look north to see Sug and Pilgrim on the next peak. We waved like idiots, excited to be out in open, under the warm clear skies. The majority of our time on the trail was passed hiking under the cover of forest, catching only glimpses of the sky when we reached a summit once, maybe twice, a day. To have unlimited views and sun gave the day a magical twinge and made me feel free and happy and almost nostalgic, wanting to hang onto this precise feeling forever.

Around noon, we spotted an old barn in a field a couple hundred yards off the trail. I checked the guidebook and figured that this was the Over Mountain shelter- a barn that had been converted into a shelter several years back. E and I walked down to have lunch and found Sug, Pilgrim, Nasty and Shaman already there.

“Let’s go outside,” Pilgrim suggested after we had eaten. The six of us lay in a row on the grass in front of the barn, letting the sun warm us, for over an hour. Every once in awhile someone would speak and we’d joke for a few minutes, but mostly we lay in comfortable silence, each soaking up the moment. It felt amazing to be there, to have nothing to do the rest of the day but walk in a landscape that most people would never be lucky enough to experience, for once to be warm enough to linger and close our eyes, and not have to hurry along to generate body heat.

“This is it.” E said, arms folded behind her head, eyes closed to the sun, “This is all I wanted.”

Eventually, we left the spot, rested and content, and set to climbing one last steep bald. I loved that while distance grew between us- Pilgrim first, then Sug, then E, and me, as usual, bringing up the rear, I could still see each of them, little dots making their way up the long climb. After making it to the top, the rest of the day’s hike was downhill, and I made it to the shelter for that night in good time. I was surprised to see Mike and See Blue building a fire, I had figured they would have hiked further than us that day.

“Hey!” Mike called out. He told me that he and See Blue had stayed at the barn the night before and so had made it to this shelter before lunch. “There’s a road crossing a couple tenths of a mile up the trail from here, so See Blue and I decided to hitch into town and pick up beer and hot dogs for everyone.”

“There’s beer?” I asked, thinking that after having the perfect day, this was too good to be true.

“There’s beer.” said Mike, as he put a cold Busch light in my hand.

We spent the night roasting hot dogs and drinking beer, telling crude jokes, and laughing at Nasty’s antics. Nasty, a tall, goofball of a guy, seemed a stereo-typcial stoner, and you never knew what nonsensical phrase would come out of his mouth next. Noticing that he had smoked three cigarettes in a row, he quipped “I’m smoking like a bitch out of water!” E and I doubled over in laughter when Nasty, searching frantically through his bag, muttered to no one in particular, “where is it? where is it?” and then pulled his hands out the bag, with his pointer fingers and thumbs looking like a shooter’s, and said with a smile “ahh, here it is…the old fart gun,” letting one rip.

Tears rolled down my face, “I totally wasn’t expecting that!”

“It was just…so well timed.” E giggled.

As we finally all settled into our sleeping bags, the fire still crackling, I wrote in my journal “by far- my favorite day on the trail.“

To be continued…

And I did know, I had missed him so much during the long weeks on the trail, but I also felt a twinge of annoyance. This was the kind of easy camaraderie I had pictured the countless times I had dreamed of the trail over the past year. I knew that when Kevin left the next day, these were the people that I would be hiking with and eating and sleeping next to for days to come. I wanted him to understand why I needed to be out there, and thought that if he could have a true “trail” experience, he’d feel closer to me when he was home. I didn’t understand why my usually affable boyfriend couldn’t just have a good time. I thought about earlier that day, while Kevin slept, when Miss Janet had asked me how the visit was going.

“Good…I think.”

“It’s hard to have someone visit.” She said gently, pouring me a mug of coffee. “I’ve seen it a million times when a hiker’s boyfriend or girlfriend comes out to see them. Remember that while you’ve been out here having all of these intense experiences and making all of these new,male,friends,” she raised an eyebrow, “he’s been sitting at home missing you. He’s probably a little jealous. Just be sensitive, you’ve got a good guy there.”

Remembering Miss Janet’s advice, I swallowed my annoyance, kissed Kevin on the cheek and apologized, “I know, babe, I’m sorry, we’ll have all day tomorrow. I promise.”

Miss Janet had offered to slack pack us the next day, so after another hearty breakfast she shuttled Mike, E, Sug, Pilgrim, Kevin and I twenty miles up the trail so that we could hike south back to her place. Slack packing meant that we could hike without our heavy packs, still move along the trail, but sleep in a bed again that night.

Soon after Miss Janet dropped us off, the rest of the group broke away from Kevin and I. For a thru-hiker, hiking without a pack brings a special freedom. Without the extra thirty-five pounds weighing me down, I felt like I could run up and down the mountains, which is exactly what the rest of the crew was doing. Kevin, while not out-of-shape (but not in spectacular shape either- he was more of a pick-up game and beer kind of guy), didn’t have the stamina the rest of us had acquired over the past month, and so he and I slowly made our way through the woods. After about three miles, Kevin asked to take a break.

“Of course!” I said, forcing myself to stay cheerful even though I was getting antsy by how slow we were walking and worried about how far in front of us the others must be. That morning, Miss Janet had offered to pick Kevin up at a road crossing 10 miles into the hike, but he had refused, figuring he could finish the full twenty miles the rest of us had planned. I had encouraged him to reconsider, thinking that twenty miles might be a struggle, but he insisted he wanted to try.

“Okay, honey,” Miss Janet told him, slipping me her phone number and telling me to bring Kevin’s cell phone, “just in case he changes his mind.”

I found two tree stumps and took out a package of crackers from my jacket pocket. “Here, eat these, they’ll give you a little energy.”

After a few minutes, I noticed Kevin staring at me, “You’re not tired at all, are you?”

“Well…no…not really.”

We started hiking again, over, what seemed to me, fairly easy terrain. Every 15 minutes or so, Kevin needed to stop and catch his breath, and I became increasingly nervous that he was physically not going to be able to hike the full twenty miles. About six miles in, I finally told him that we needed to call Miss Janet and see if she could pick him up. I was scared I would hurt his ego, but to my surprise, he agreed right away. When we reached an open field, I punched Miss Janet’s number into Kevin’s cell, only to find that there was no reception.

Kevin looked panicked, “What are we going to do?”

“Well…” I said carefully, “I guess we’ll just take it slow and keep hiking. I don’t know what else to do.”

The further we hiked, the more worn out Kevin got. And the more worn out he got, the more irritable he became. He started snipping at me, “You don’t pick up your feet at all when you hike.”

“Really? Well, it hasn’t hurt me so far…” Still trying to keep the cheer in my voice.

“It looks so weird. I’m surprised you don’t fall more. You should try picking up your feet.”

Finally, I’d had enough. “LOOK. What is your problem? I know you’re tired, but you complain that we aren’t spending enough time together and the minute we’re alone all you do is bitch at me. What is it, Kevin?? What?” Tears streamed down my face.

“I’m sorry,” he said, tears in his eyes, putting his arms around me. “It’s just, it’s been really hard without you. And, I come out here and you’re having all this fun and it doesn’t seem like you’ve missed me at all. And…and now I’m just frustrated with myself that I’m so tired and we’re not even halfway finished. And I don’t know…”

“What?”

“Well…it sucks to have your girlfriend be in better shape that you are.” He looked down at me sheepishly.

I started laughing, “Kevin…all I’ve been doing for the past month is hiking, of course I’m going to be a stronger hiker at this point. I totally sucked at the beginning!” I gave him a playful rib poke, ” I mean, I wasn’t as slow as you, but I totally sucked.”

The tension cleared, we started walking again. I tried several more times to call Miss Janet, but could never get a signal. At the pace we were going, I feared it would be well after sundown before we finished. Eventually, we came into a clearing and spotted a parking area, which I figured was the 10 mile point.

Just as I was saying “Maybe we can find someone to give you a ride into town!” I spotted Miss Janet’s van in the parking lot. I felt a rush of relief.

“I thought maybe I should just come on anyway…just in case.” She drawled, giving me a wink. E and Sug climbed out the back of the van, handing Kevin and I both donuts and orange juice.

“Sug and I decided we’d wait here, so you’d have someone to finish with.” E told me as we hugged like we hadn’t seen each other in weeks. “Mike and Pilgrim are long gone.”

I thanked Miss Janet and said good-bye to Kevin, who was going to try to find us a hotel room for the night, and then E, Sug, and I started back up the trail. My mood was infinitely lighter and we hiked almost twice as fast as Kevin and I had.

“We were starting to worry…it was taking you guys so long.” E confided.

“Yeah, dude, he was really struggling.”

“Poor guy.”

I decided to chalk the weirdness with Kevin up to his exhaustion and the strain of our time apart. Besides, I was having too good a time with E and Sug, the three of us telling stories from our past, and making up ridiculous scenarios for our future. We were practically running down the trail, even 16 miles into the day, and I marveled at how strong I felt. I told E and Sug about the pact I had made with myself at the beginning of March, when I decided that I would give the trail a month, and if I was still miserable, I would quit.

“I can’t imagine quitting now! We’ve come too far!”

“But does having Kevin here make you want to go home…even a little bit?” Sug asked, probably thinking about his own girlfriend he’d left back in New York.

“No. Not even a little bit.” I said emphatically. “I mean, look, I miss him so much. Everyday I miss him. But this is a once in a lifetime thing, and he’ll still be there when I get home.”

“Good!” E said, putting her arm around me. “I wouldn’t let you leave me anyway.”

We arrived at our pick-up point, still in a great mood and feeling surprisingly energetic for having just finished a 20 mile day. We used a payphone to call Miss Janet, who in turn called Kevin. Miss Janet told me that Kevin had crashed as soon as he got in the van, but that he’d found us a hotel room and wanted to come get me. Miss Janet arrived first with her van full of hikers to pick up E and Sug. It was getting dark, so they decided to wait with me until Kevin got there. Ten minutes passed and the hikers started getting restless; they were on their way to dinner when Miss Janet stopped. After twenty minutes, we started to worry.

“Just go ahead.” I told them.

“No, honey, why don’t I bring you back to my place and you can call Kevin from there.” Miss Janet offered. Then looking at the hungry van of hikers, she added, “I’ll just drop these guys off first.”

I was climbing into the van when the headlight’s of Kevin’s Jeep appeared. Kevin looked frazzled, so I said a quick goodbye to Miss Janet and the hikers and got in the Jeep.

“I got lost.” he mumbled, “I’ve been driving around this fucking town for 30 minutes.”

I touched his hand. “We’ll you’ve got me now. Come on, let’s go back to the hotel.”

An hour later we were content, laying on the ratty motel bed, an empty pizza box sitting on the floor. We watched TV and made small talk, laughing like we always did at the ridiculous reality show contestants. He talked about his job and told me stories about our cat named Cat. As we turned off the lights, my head resting comfortably on his shoulder I said “I’m really glad you came.”

“Are you?”

“Yeah, I really am. And I’m sorry things weren’t perfect. I just, I guess I just wanted you to feel a part of this.”

“But darlin’, I’m not a part of it. This is your thing.” He kissed the top of my head. “And that’s okay. I guess it’s just hard knowing that tomorrow you’ll be back out there and I’ll be driving home where the only thing waiting for me is a flea-bitten cat.”

“Only a few more months and I’ll be all yours.”

“You promise?”

“As long as you get rid of those damned fleas.”

The next morning, after a tearful goodbye, I watched from the sidewalk as Kevin’s Jeep drove away. E walked down from Miss Janet’s porch and put her arm around me. “You okay, babe?”

“Yeah…I’m just a little sad.” I said, wiping my eyes. And relieved, I thought guiltily. I felt relieved to see him go.

To be continued…

Over the next three days, Mike, E, and I, covered the distance to Erwin, Tennessee. Towards the end of a long, hard, second day, I emerged from the woods to find myself on top of a grassy bald enveloped in thick fog. I fought my way across the summit as the wind whipped around me, at times so forceful it was a struggle keeping my balance. And then, as I was about halfway across the bald, I heard something that made me stop in my tracks. With the wind causing the fog to swirl surreally, I listened as the voice on the small armband radio I carried told me that the United States was officially at war with Iraq. Tears rolled down my cheeks, and I finished the final miles to the shelter in a daze. Having grown up in the Air Force, I thought about the military families dealing with this news, and my heart broke. At the same time, after being on the trail for only a month, it was eerie how disconnected I felt from the outside world. I felt almost as if what I was hearing was happening to another country- I couldn’t, or didn’t want to, wrap my mind around the reality. When I shared the news with Mike and E, we marveled over how lucky we felt to be where we were.

Later that night, I discovered that one of my toenails had fallen off. “Great,” I said, in a lame attempt at a joke, “First the war and now this!”

However, when we woke the next morning, our minds were solely focused on getting to Erwin. We planned to take a zero day there, which would give us some much needed rest and allow me to spend time with Kevin, who would be arriving from Florida that evening. I was anxious to make amends after the drunken St. Patrick’s Day phone call. Even though we hadn’t been able to talk much in the past month, I had kept up with his day-to-day in the letters he wrote me each night and then sent, along with candy or other supplies, to whichever post office we were set to be at next. The letters were always very sweet and supportive, but I could tell that he was struggling with my absence.

The day’s hike was hard, but we finished by 2:30pm and soon got a hitch into the small town with a woman and her young son, who seemed both nervous and excited about picking up backpackers. With a wave, they dropped us off at Miss Janet’s, a hikers’ hostel famous among the AT community for the owner’s kindness and generosity. Sitting on the porch were two dark headed hikers, who introduced themselves as Firewood and Magic. Because up until then, Magic was ahead of us on the trail, I had read his entries most nights in the trail registries- notebooks kept at each shelter where hikers can sign in and write about their hike. Given the terse tone of Magic’s entries I wasn’t surprised that I found him a bit abrasive (”a real asshole” is how I phrased it in my journal that night). Firewood, on the other hand, was soft spoken and helpful, telling us that Miss Janet was out for the afternoon shuttling some hikers around, but would be back by 5pm.

Thanking him, we left our packs on the porch and headed down the block to get something to eat. Mike had read that there was a place in town with amazing burritos, but when we got there we found a sign on the door reading “Closed- Gone to Bristol.” We saw similar signs at several other businesses in town, and learned that because so many people in Erwin, including shop owners, were at the Nascar race in nearby Bristol, Tennessee, most of the small stores in town had closed for the weekend. We finally found an open Sonic and settled in for a snack of fries and onion rings.

As we were walking back to Miss Janet’s I heard someone yelling my name. I turned and saw Kevin leaning against his silver Jeep. My heart soared as I ran and jumped into his arms. When we finally untangled ourselves, I whispered in his ear “I’m sorry about the phone call.”

“I’m sorry, too.” He replied squeezing me tight. And then laughing, “Darlin’, you stink!”

“What? I showered, like, five days ago!”

Hand-in-hand, we made our way back to Miss Janet’s, where we met Miss Janet herself and found that she was exactly as advertised. She helped Kevin and I search for a local hotel, and then when we realized that because of the Nascar race all motels within a 30 mile radius were booked, she made room for us at the hostel. Once we were settled, Kevin asked E and I if we were hungry. We looked at him like he was crazy.

“Dude,” E told him earnestly, “We are ALWAYS hungry.” Like most hikers, after a few weeks on the trail, we had developed an insatiable appetite. Hauling a heavy pack up and down mountains from sunup to sundown burns an incredible number of calories, and it was nearly impossible to carry enough food to replenish our bodies each day. When we were in town, the amount we ate was equal parts amazing and horrifying. Mike, who had seemed irritable all day, decided to stay at Miss Janet’s while Kevin, E, and I drove a half hour to eat our weight in food at an Outback Steakhouse.

Not surprisingly, we woke up hungry the next morning, too, and Miss Janet fixed us all a breakfast of biscuts and gravy and eggs. Kevin spent most of the day shuttling E and I around, Mike, once again opting to hang back with the other hikers at Miss Janet’s. We had gone to the grocery store, lunch, done laundry, caught a matinee of the movie “Old School”, and were heading back to the hostel when we spotted two familiar figures walking down the street.

“Can you pull over?” I asked Kevin, as E and I hopped out of the Jeep to greet Pilgrim and Sugar High. “You guys made it!!” The four of us excitedly talked over each other, recounting the four days since we last saw one another. They told us that they had tried to leave Elmer’s to catch up with us the morning after St. Patty’s day, but were too hungover to hike, and so ended up staying there another night. They had just checked in at Miss Janet’s and were on their way to Sonic when we stopped them. After several minutes, I realized I had left Kevin sitting by himself in the Jeep.

“Oh shit, guys this is my boyfriend, Kevin. Kevin, Pilgrim and Sugar High, the guys I told you about?”

Graciously, Pilgrim walked over to shake hands with Kevin, saying “Hey man, Not Yet told us all about you. How was the drive?”

When we all got back to the hostel, Miss Janet announced that everyone was going to the local Mexican Restaurant for dinner, and that we should be ready in an hour. Kevin and I tried again to find a hotel for the evening, and once again, struck out. As we were getting ready to go, Miss Janet pulled out a box of clothes from Goodwill and encouraged everyone to pick out an outfit, knowing it would be fun for all of us to wear something other than our hiking clothes.

She pulled E and I aside, “You girls should wear some of these dresses to dinner…it’d be nice to feel like a woman for an evening, huh?”

Outfitted in oversized dresses, but with high spirits, we piled in the back of Miss Janet’s van with ten other hikers, including See Blue, Mike, Pilgrim, and Sugar High. We filled three booths at the restaurant, and ordered an enormous array of food and several rounds of beer. While the rest of us talked excitedly, telling trail stories, and comparing experiences, Kevin was quiet.

“Hey,” I said, squeezing his arm, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine…”

“What?”

Looking around at our boisterous group, Kevin lowered his voice, “It’s just…I wanted to spend time with you, ya know?”

To be continued…

“Dude…my hands are in my sleeping bag.”

After a restless night spent paranoid about what might be crawling around the shelter, but with no additional sightings, E and I woke early, excited to finally get to Hot Springs. Chris, (E’s sister Cara’s fiance) had told us that once we reached Hot Springs we were officially thru-hikers. We had also heard about a bed and breakfast in the middle of town called Elmer’s that was supposedly very accommodating to thru-hikers. Luckily, the terrain was mostly flat and downhill and we arrived in Hot Springs in time for lunch.

Elmer’s turned out to be better than advertised; a warm, beautiful Victorian home full of musical instruments and books and home cooked vegetarian food that, because the owner had hiked the AT, allowed dirty, messy thru-hikers to stay for next to nothing. E and I settled into our room, thrilled to each have our own bed and a door that shut, we took showers, and headed down the two block main street. After loading up on a greasy lunch that instantly had me clutching my stomach and running for the bathroom, we hit the post office, laundry, grocery store, and outfitter. It wasn’t until we returned to Elmers that we realized we hadn’t seen Mike, or Pilgrim and Sugar High since we’d arrived. We asked around and Turbo, the hiker who had passed us on our way into the Smokies, told us that they were doing “work for stay,” an option at several hostels along the trail offered to hikers low on cash to do handy work in exchange for room and board. E and I had both saved enough money working in the year before we left to comfortably get us through five months of hiking, but those guys, recent college graduates (or, like Mike, on a break from college), were always low on cash.

Mike popped his head in our room an hour later to let us know he had made it back, and shortly after the three of headed down the street to the one bar in town, the Paddlers’ Pub. Earlier that day I had bought new army green hiking pants, pleased because I seemed to have lost some weight, so those and the long sleeve hiking shirt I usually slept in became my “going out” clothes. Mike was bubbling over with stories from his night spent with Pilgrim and Sugar High, and of his day spent working for Elmer. We ordered beer samplers and proceeded to offer cheers for each new flavor.

“To becoming real mother fucking thru-hikers.” Mike proposed.

“Real mother fucking thru-hikers!” E and I echoed as we raised our glasses.

Not long after we’d finished our samplers, we spotted Pilgrim and Sugar High sitting at a booth with a hiker I’d never seen before. They motioned us over and we all squeezed in.

“I’m See Blue” said the stranger in a gravely voice, offering me his hand. It was clear right away that See Blue was not the run of the mill thru-hiker. Thru-hikers generally come in three varieties: 20 somethings rying to stave off the real world for a bit longer, the recently retired who are realizing a life-long dream, and the perpetual wanderer. See Blue was none of these. He was in his mid-thirties and had been a tow truck driver in North Carolina before selling his business and starting his hike. I could instantly picture him in the front row of a concert screaming “Hell yeah, brothers! FREE BIRD!!!!” He was tall and wiry with a mess of dirty blonde hair, a full set of false teeth that he proudly took out for a laugh, and an ever-present cigarette dangling from his lips. Within minutes he had told us all about the love of his life, Roxie, a 22 year old hair dresser he’d left at home, and ordered the table a round of shots.

After the shots, the rest of the night was a blur. At some point E wrote on the backs of all of our hands “19.6″- a reference to the distance we were supposed to hike the next day and a reminder not to drink too much; a reminder I promptly chose to ignore. I was having too much fun to think about how I might feel the next day. Although the bar was packed for St. Patrick’s Day, the six of us made ourselves the center of the action, laughing loudly, teasing each other, making friends with the regulars, and just generally acting like fools. E, Sugar High and I started an impromptu dance party, persuading as many as we could to dance like assholes with us to Britney Spears or Justin Timberlake. The other guys bellied up to the bar, which is where we left them at 11:30pm when E finally convinced Sugar High and I that it was time to leave.

“Mike really likes hanging out with ‘the guys’, huh?” I gossiped to E as we teetered down the street. E, who had wisely cut herself off around 9pm, walked the rest of the way to Elmer’s while Sugar High and I stopped at the bank of pay phones. After several miss-dials, I correctly entered Kevin’s number while Sugar High called his longtime girlfriend, Jen.

“Hello?” answered a sleepy voice.

“Keeeeevviiin! Happy St. Patty’s Day!” I shouted drunkenly into the phone in an embarrassing attempt at an Irish accent.

“I thought you were going to call before dinner.” Kevin said in a flat voice. I had called while we were running errands earlier but he was at work, so the conversation had been brief.

The reception on the pay phone was not very good. “What? Oh, right, I just, totally got busy…” I trailed off and then laughed when I caught Sugar High raising his eyebrows at me.

“Okay, well…why don’t you just call me in the morning. I was already asleep and I can’t hear you very well.” The same flat voice.

“Ummm…we’re heading out really early, so I don’t think I can. But I’ll see you in a few days, right?” We had made plans for him to drive up to Erwin, Tennessee, the next town we’d be stopping in, to visit for two days.

“Yeah, see you in a few days. Just…call me when you get into town. Good night.”

“Wait, Kev?” The line was dead. “Shit.” I muttered, staring at the receiver. I caught Sugar High’s eye, and we both burst into beer soaked giggles. “Holy shit, I think I just got hung the fuck up on.”

“Happens.” He said as he steered me back towards Elmer’s.

We sat on the back porch for over an hour talking about the struggles of leaving someone at home while we were on this journey and about what we thought the future held for our respective relationships. Sug (as we had started calling him) was sympathetic and easy to talk to, the kind of guy who girls loved to be friends with. We talked in low voices until, around one A.M., Pilgrim came stumbling around the corner, having just left the bar.

“I think I just did a shot of wheat grass.” he slurred.

“I’m pretty sure that doesn’t have alcohol in it.” Sug laughed.

“I thought it tasted funny,” giving me a sly grin. Pilgrim, I thought, was not the type of guy girls wanted to be friends with. The three of us finally headed to bed at one thirty, and I was asleep within seconds of my head hitting the pillow.

The next morning, E woke me up at 6:00am. I groaned and looked at her, remembering the 19.6 miles, and pulled the sheet back over my head. When I finally stumbled out of the room, I ran into Pilgrim, dressed in only his boxer shorts, looking like I felt. He grunted at me, scratched his head, and went into the bathroom.

Twenty minutes later, E and I were on the porch tying up our boots when Sugar High popped his head out the front door. “Hey guys, I don’t think we’re going to make it out for awhile, so I just wanted to say goodbye and I hope we catch up with you soon.”

We exchanged hugs and reassurances that we would all meet up again within the next few days. We looked around for Mike, decided that he was probably staying back with the other boys, and then E and I pounded fists, which still had “19.6″ scrawled on the back of them, and headed off. My head pounded from too little sleep and too much beer. Soon enough, E pulled away from me, and I trudged up mountain after mountain by myself, constantly fighting my hangover. I thought about my conversation with Kevin, and realized how frustrating our conversation must have been for him; for that matter, how frustrating every quick phone call over the last three weeks must have been. He was planning to meet me in a few days in Erwin and I hoped that once we were face to face things would be smoothed over. I replayed the previous night in my head, smiling at the memory of E, Sug and I dancing and Mike, Pilgrim, and See Blue commandeering the bar. I tried to imagine Kevin in that scene, but couldn’t quite make him fit.

Towards the end of the day it started drizzling, a constant mist that soaked through my clothes but never quite turned into rain. With about two miles to go I was completely spent, with no idea how I would make it the rest of the way. This was the farthest I’d ever hiked so even under ideal conditions it would have been a struggle. In a daze, I made my way up the last steep climb to the shelter, crawling hand over foot at times to propel myself forward. I had thrown my pack off and dramatically collapsed on the floor of the shelter before it registered that there were lots of other people there. I spotted several thru-hikers, including See Blue, who sat at the picnic table smoking a cigarette and writing in his journal.

“College group,” whispered E, nodding to the six people I didn’t recognize.

“How far did you guys hike today?” asked a girl from the group.

“Oh my god, that’s amazing…I could never hike that far!” she exclaimed after we told her.

“I didn’t think I could either.” I said, still sprawled out on the shelter floor. Not hungry, but knowing I had to eat, I begrudgingly cooked dinner and was already in my sleeping bag when we heard someone coming into camp.

“MIKE! Shit dude, we didn’t think you were coming!”

Mike flopped down next to me, looking as exhausted as I was, “Come on…I couldn’t leave you two.”

To be continued…

Then, taking a deep breath, I told myself to ’suck it up’, and started walking again. By this point in the hike, the turn around time between despair and resolve was little to none. I could have a nervous breakdown one minute and be laughing the next, knowing that I quite literally had to keeping putting one foot in front of the other. Within ten minutes I had reached a small stream trickling down the side of the mountain and I stopped to fill my empty water bottle.

“Hey” a voice called from behind me. I turned to see a tall, thin hiker with bright blue eyes, wearing running shoes and carrying one of the smallest packs I’d seen. We chatted while we both got water and he told me his name was CT.

“Hey, I’ve heard about you!” I told him, “You’re the guy who hikes, like, 30 miles a day, right?”

He laughed kindly, and said that was him, that he was trying to finish quickly, “It gets a little lonely, though, I never get to really meet people, you know.”

“Yeah, you just breeze right past them…later suckers!”

He took off ahead of me, turning to yell back “later sucker!” and I knew that would be the last I’d see of him. E and I had yet to hike 20 miles in one day, and doing thirty seemed near impossible.

Finally rehydrated and feeling inspired, I pushed myself to finish the day strong. When I got to the shelter, which lay in a grassy valley, E, Mike, Sugar High and Pilgrim sat at a picnic table talking. “Look who else is here!” E said, pointing to the shelter, and I turned to see Doc and Virginia Creeper, the sweet older couple who we had met a week earlier. The seven of us gathered around the picnic table to cook dinner, conversation flowing easily as we talked about ourselves and our hikes. After dinner Pilgrim challenged me to a “foot off” and we removed our bandages to show off our respective foot injuries- his, a rash that covered most of both feet, and mine, gaping heel wounds that still refused to mend. I won, hands down, and E declared that the whole thing was “fucking disgusting.”

That night, as we lay in our sleeping bags, talking and laughing like old friends, I thought about CT, making this trip by himself, and knew I wouldn’t want to do it that way, no matter how impressive the physical feat.

**************

The next day, E and I stuck close together. We talked about Doc and Virginia Creeper, who we both had fallen in love with that morning when, still in their sleeping bags, Doc had leaned over to kiss Virginia and whispered “hey stinky” to which Virginia had responded with a girlish giggle. They were hiking South for a couple of weeks (while we were forever headed North), so we knew we wouldn’t seem them for awhile. We giggled about how we thought Pilgrim was hot and Sugar High was sweet. “Just like us” E said.

“Wait? Which one am I?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” She laughed.

The day passed quickly, and by 2pm we were at the shelter. Mike and Sugar High sat swinging their legs off the front.

“We’ve got a proposition.” Mike said, looking at us expectantly. ”We think you guys should hike to the next shelter with us. It’s ten miles…but that would mean we’d get into town early tomorrow.” The next day was March 17th and the night before we had all decided we’d stay in Hot Springs, NC, a town right off the trail, to celebrate St. Patrick’s day.

“Since when did Mike become a we with Sugar High and Pilgrim?” I asked E after we’d sent the guys on their way, telling them there was no way in hell we were walking another ten miles and that we’d see them the next day.

“He just needs some dude time.” E said, rolling her eyes. And apparently we needed some girl time, too. It was the first night the two of us had been alone in a shelter together and we passed the time gossiping and laughing, talking in a language only the two of us could understand.

At one point I asked E, “do you think Pilgrim and Sugar High call each other by their trail names? Because I’m sorry, I just can’t call you Sweet n’ Low.”

“Nah, dude,” E said, suddenly very serious, “When you’re best friends you don’t need names, you’re just like… ‘Hey!’”

It was quiet for about two seconds before we simultaneously burst out laughing, both of us rolling on the shelter floor. We’d recover, start talking about something else, and then one of us would say “it’s just like…Hey!” and we’d lose it again.

Later, after the sun was down, we lay side by side in our sleeping bags.

“E?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for making me do this.”

A few minutes later, “E?”

“Yeah?”

“Did you touch me or did a mouse just crawl across my head?”

To be continued…