See Blue, who’d gotten ahead of us the day before we’d found Pilgrim and Sug at the Dutch Haus, had been able to hike big miles through Shenandoah and Northern Virginia without us to slow his long legs down, but had spent a couple of days off in Harper’s Ferry with his girlfriend, Roxy.

“You just missed her.” He told us in his gravelly voice over dinner that night. He sighed deeply, his blue eyes focused on something beyond my head. “I’m glad you girls are here, I don’t know how much longer I’d make it by myself.”

I caught E’s eye and she raised an eyebrow. See Blue often talked idly about leaving the trail if it got too hard to be away from Roxy, but I never saw it as a real possibility. I chalked his melancholy up to having just said goodbye, remembering how Kevin’s visit had thrown me off for a few days, too. At some point, I’d stopped thinking about leaving as an option, even though in the first month of the trail I’d fantasized constantly of quitting. I was out of shape, constantly in pain, and mentally and physically spent in a way that I didn’t know was possible. Home, laying on the couch with Kevin, was a comfortable place I’d often let my mind wander to as I cursed the trail and struggled to catch my breath; truly believing, every time, that I couldn’t take one more step. But over the last few weeks, even though I was still constantly exhausted, frequently bored, and popping Ibprofen in massive quantities to mask the hurt, I’d noticed that my daydreams were less about home and more about life after finishing the trail. I assumed it would be the same for See Blue once we got back in the woods.

It was 3:30pm before we set out the next day, and it didn’t take long to see that See Blue wasn’t the only one struggling. Even with the new knee brace, E was having a hard time walking. The first several miles out of Harpers Ferry, including the only two miles of the A.T. in West Virginia, are completely flat before the trail rises gradually in Maryland. So even with E’s hobbling, we got to the first shelter quickly and I almost suggested we kept moving until I caught the visible relief on E’s face as she took her pack off and sat down. I’d worn the same expression countless times myself, when I’d kept it together just long enough to get through the day and the notion of going any further would have shattered me. It turned out we had stopped in the exact right place, because a half hour after us, Just Ducky, Soft Serve, and Snake walked in and set down their packs on the picnic bench. Immediately, Just Ducky noticed E’s knee brace, telling her he was a physical therapist, and got right to business diagnosing her problem (patellar tendonitis).

“This brace you bought is useless.” he proclaimed, and proceeded to MacGyver a proper brace out of the one she got at the outfitter and a piece of the water tubing from her camelback; hand sewing the neoprene around the tube into a band that would sit right below her knee and apply pressure onto the patellar tendon.

“It’s a miracle!” E hugged Just Ducky after she’d taken a few steps with it on.

Just Ducky shook his head, laughing at her enthusiasm. “No, but it should help with the pain some. I assume taking a break is out of the question?”

E looked at me and I said “we can do whatever you need,” knowing there was no way either of us would really consider stopping long enough to heal her injury.

The next day the six of us set out walking together and by mid-day were bombarded by more hikers than we’d ever seen at once going the opposite direction.

“It’s the Maryland Challenge,” one of them told us. These hikers were attempting to go through Maryland on the A.T. from the Pennsylvania border to the West Virginia border, 42 miles, in one day. The trail in this section is mostly flat and smooth, making such big mileage feasible. Snake came up with a game where we had to greet each hiker differently (“hello”, “howdy”, “how’s it hanging”, “’sup?”) and if you repeated yourself, you were out. Even See Blue, who usually hiked out of our sight during the day, played along.

Kristy and Eric, two hikers we hadn’t seen since outside of Damascus, caught up to us at lunch and told us they’d seen Mike and Ben in Harper’s Ferry, but that they were taking the day off to meet up with Ben’s family. I was happy to think that since they were just a day behind, we’d probably hike with Mike again. It bothered me that we hadn’t really said goodbye after spending so much of our early days together. And I was interested to meet Ben. Pilgrim had made him sound like a great guy, had told me Ben was planning to move to Chicago with his girlfriend after the trail, so I thought we might have a lot in common. I started leaving Mike and Ben messages in the journals at each shelter we stopped at, knowing that the first thing most hikers do when they get to a shelter is to read the register. I’d tell Mike to hurry up and joke to Ben that we were going to be “best friends”, eventually shortening his name to BFB- Best Friend Ben.

By late afternoon, our group had spread out, making plans to meet at a biker bar called the Dog Patch that was right off the trail. E and I walked together. I noticed that her gait was easy, and I hoped that the new brace really was a miracle cure. We hiked down the mountain and crossed a bridge over I-70 (a bridge every time I drive under in the years since, I honk and wave, even if no one is on it). Still with only one working Walkman between us, E listened to Lauryn Hill’s Ex-Factor and sang along, and I listened to E and sang with her. We reached the turn-off for the bar and found See Blue sitting on a rock, smoking a cigarette, tears streaming down his face.

“What’s wro…” I started, before realizing that he was shaking, not from grief, but laughter.

“I could hear you all the way down the hill.” He managed, in between fits. “Jesus Christ, you’re the worst fucking singers I’ve ever heard. I thought someone was dying!”

E and I tried to look hurt. See Blue stood up, still laughing, put a lanky arm around each of us, and together we walked to the bar.

To be continued…

It was April 27th when we left Shenandoah and all its craziness behind and started the home stretch into Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, the symbolic halfway point of the trail (the actual halfway mark is another 70 miles away in the middle of the woods in Pennsylvania). I was conflicted about finishing the roughly 50 miles to get to Harper’s Ferry. Harper’s Ferry had been our interim goal for so long that it seemed surreal to finally be so close. It would mean that we were finally out of Virginia and we would be able to check in at the Appalachian Trail Conference visitor’s center as official thru-hikers (the ATC is headquartered in Harper’s Ferry). But also, Pilgrim and Sug would be leaving the trail for a few days to stay at Pilgrim’s sister, Jen’s house.

We stopped at a shelter about six miles past Front Royal, Virginia that night, still laughing about E’s ass explosion incident earlier in the day. Sitting on the picnic bench out front were two men and a woman in their mid-forties who introduced themselves as Just Ducky, Soft Serve and Snake. Just Ducky and Soft Serve were a married couple who’d started the trail a week before E and I, and I’d followed Soft Serve’s entries in the trail registries eagerly, her neat scrawl detailing the experience of the only other woman thru-hiker we knew of. It was a bit like meeting a celebrity, where you know so much about the person and feel an instant kinship before realizing they know nothing of you. The three of them turned out to be lovely people and we spent the evening swapping our misadventures and talking about future plans. E made everyone campfire brownies and Just Ducky provided peanut butter for frosting.

We said our goodbyes the next morning, the four of us planning to hike further than the three of them that day. The day was beautiful and the 25 miles passed uneventfully, but still, a collective melancholy had set in by the time E, Sug, Pilgrim and I sat silently in the shelter that night. Partially, we were worn out from the stretch we had just hiked called “the Rollercoaster” that lived up to its name. We’d been told that the trail maker had purposely routed an unnecessarily difficult series of ascents and descents and I felt it in my aching feet. And partially, at least for me, was the realization that in a day the certainty of our little group would be up in the air again. We got into our sleeping bags early that night, and had all been asleep several hours when a sound woke everyone and caused a chorus of “WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?”

Awake now, I saw whatever it was zip across the front of the shelter again, rustling the leaves as it ran into the woods.

“Jesus, was that a coyote? A fox?” I whispered.

“It sounded like a velociraptor.” E answered, voice shaking.

“Damnit. I have to pee, but no way I’m leaving now.” I said eventually.

The animal never reappeared, but none of us slept well after that and in the morning we decided that the 25 miles into Harper’s Ferry we’d had planned wasn’t happening. I wasn’t too disappointed, since that meant we’d all have an extra day together. We hiked 4 miles to Snicker’s Gap and then a mile down the road to eat lunch at a restaurant. After lunch we decided to try to hitchhike back up to the trail, in keeping with our policy of no extra miles unless it leads to food. The first car that stopped was a white haired man who introduced himself as Don Maloney. As he drove, he told us how he had retired to the area and started a woodworking shop with his wife, Harriet.

“If you want to see the shop, it’s just up the road at our house and you can walk through our woods to get back to the trail from there.” Don offered.

I was already completely charmed by Don, and I could tell by how readily the others agreed to go to his house, that they were, too. In most other contexts, I would laugh at someone who told me they’d hitched a ride from a stranger and then had willing gone to their house. I would joke that it’s the beginning of every awful slasher film. But on the trail and with Don, the situation seemed perfectly normal.

We were lucky we’d lost our real world hesitation, because the visit to Don’s house became one of my favorite memories of the trail. He introduced us to Harriet and the house they’d built together. He showed us his studio, where he hand crafted gorgeous bowls and other pieces from the woods on their property. E, especially, was delighted when he showed us the Guinness he kept on tap in the shop. Don was a storyteller, entertaining while showing us how to use a lathe. It was several hours before we reluctantly agreed that we should get going, but not before E had ordered a bowl, made from wood found along the Appalachian Trail, as a wedding present for her sister Cara and Cara’s fiancé, Chris, whose wedding we’d be going to in a month.

It was a perfect way to spend a last day with our friends.

The next day, we passed the 1,000 mile point, made it to Harper’s Ferry in the morning and checked in at the ATC. We were the 13th-16th thru-hikers to make it there that season, and E and I were the 2nd and 3rd women (we later found out that Ducky and Soft Serve had hiked through the night to pass us because Soft Serve had wanted to check in as the first woman). We lingered at lunch with the boys until they finally had to go to meet Pilgrim’s sister.

“I’m so sad.” I blurted while I was hugging Sug for the 8th time.

“We’ll see you guys again. It’s definitely going to work out.” Sug told me, ever the optimist.

I honestly didn’t see how it would happen, but I nodded my agreement. They would be slack packing for several days from Jen’s house, doing bigger miles than we could with our packs and then we each would be getting off the trail for various reasons (E and I to go to Cara’s wedding, Sug to a friend’s wedding and Pilgrim for his graduation). As I watched them walk down the street, I felt sure it was for the last time.

When they were gone, E and I walked down to the post office, E complaining for the first time that day about her knee hurting. It took awhile to sort through the packages we’d received- I got a big haul from Kevin, with candy and fuel and sweet notes; as well as boxes from both my mom and my dad- and by the time we started walking up the hill to check into a hotel, E’s muscles had stiffened to the point where she could barely walk. Silent tears rolled down her face and it hurt to see how much pain she was in. We would walk a few feet, stop, she’d take a deep breath, and we’d start again. When we finally reached the hotel, I found E some ice, propped her up on the bed, gave her an unadvisable amount of ibuprofen, and cracked open a Corona. After two beers apiece, E felt in good enough shape to walk to the outfitter, where E bought new shoes and a knee brace, and I bought a belt to keep the pants up on my shrinking waist.

As we walked back through the lobby of the historic hotel, E said, “I got so used to having the boys around. It feels weird, right?”

“For sure. It’s too quiet.” I had the room key in my hand and was putting it in the lock when I stopped short. Stuck to our door was a note in familiar handwriting that read, “Ladies, I just got here. Let’s go to dinner.”

We’d lost the boys, but See Blue was back.

To be continued…

Even though we had planned to hike four more miles that night, looking around our table at the Tap Room, it was clear that none of us was walking another step. We were all caught up in our relief and the warmth of the booze, and wanting to connect with each other in the way drunk people do. I told them about my biggest relationship regret and the guy I thought I’d probably never get over (E giving me a look and whispering, “you never told me that.”). E talked about meeting and leaving behind a guy in St. Louis and her fear that she’d never have a chance to see what could come of it (me giving her the same look). At one point, E and I stumbled to the front desk and rented a hotel room for the night (at almost a hundred dollars, it was the most expensive room we had or would rent during our hike) and then stumbled back to the bar for another round. Before we finally went to bed at the late, for us, hour of 11pm, Pilgrim and Sug convinced E and I that we should hike 33 miles the next day and we were drunk enough to agree.

I woke up the next morning feeling, not hungover- our bodies were so efficient by then that alcohol didn’t have much of a lasting affect- but nervous. We had hiked plenty of days over twenty miles, but for some reason, thirty seemed like a ridiculous distance to walk. Pilgrim and Sug had done it in the days when we were apart, telling us about a couple of hikers they’d met, Ben and Stitch, that were routinely doing 30+ mile days.

“They’re not super fast hikers. They just hike long days.”

The night before, Pilgrim had made it seem like an adventure. He’d broken the day into three parts- we’d hike 9 miles in the morning to Skyland, a Shenandoah restaurant on the trail where we’d have an early lunch, and then 18 more to a picnic area with vending machines and toilets where we’d stop for dinner, and then an easy 6 to the shelter. I found the prospect easier to consider when it was presented that way. I’d only think about the section in front of me and then pretend like the next one was a new day. But even though we easily finished the first leg, we arrived at another Shenandoah restaurant not yet open for the season.

“Okay, let’s just go” E said, always the one ready to face the task head on, while I usually dragged my feet.

“No.” Pilgrim said firmly. “We’re going to figure this out.”

“Dude. It’s closed. Let’s go.”

Pilgrim didn’t budge, head down, looking through the thru-hikers guide. So we stood there in the parking lot, packs on, waiting for him to make a move. Finally he said, “Okay, the book says that if we hike 4 more miles there is road crossing, and then 11 miles down the road is an all you can eat buffet. We’re going to get a ride down there and have lunch.”

It made no sense. Once we got to the road crossing, we’d have 20 miles still to hike, but none of us questioned him. Within an hour, we’d done the four miles and E had talked a young couple finishing up a day hike into driving us to the restaurant. And then, at the restaurant, we lingered, acting like we had nowhere to be. By the time we’d found a ride back up to the trail, it was 2pm. E sat up front talking to the older gentleman she’d found to drive us, while Sug, Pilgrim and I sat squeezed in the backseat grumbling to each other about how full we were.

“Why are all these cars parked along the side of the road?” E asked.

The man replied, “Oh, those are truffle hunters.”

“Ah.” E murmured and caught my eye in the rearview mirror. I shrugged.

“It’s big business up here, people looking for wild truffles.” The man continued, “It’s illegal to do it on federal land, but they still do.”

Back at the trail, I was strapping on my pack and I felt Sug looking at me. “You thought he was talking about chocolate, didn’t you?”

“What? No…” I said, laughing along with the others, realizing I didn’t get it, but not wanting to ask what we were laughing about. Once, when E and I were in high school, we were hanging out in our friend Amy’s kitchen. E picked up a meat tenderizer and announced, “This is what we beat the meat with at my house!” Amy and I laughed, and E continued, “You know, pound the ground,” causing Amy and I to literally roll on the floor with laughter. Finally, a clueless E asked, “Wait. Why is this so funny?” which only made us laugh harder.

Even though it was late in the day, I felt good about the rest of the hike. In my mind, we only had fourteen miles until we reached our dinner stop. The four of us hiked together, laughing and taking pictures as Sug hand fed one of the thousands of deer in the park a leaf. I didn’t even think about the remaining miles until around 6pm, when the sun started to go down, and the temperature dropped, and we were still over two miles from our dinner stop.

It was at 7pm, with the four of us huddled between two vending machines, eating candy bars and drinking sodas, watching the rain fall in the dark, when I finally asked, “Ummmm…how are we going to see the trail?”

“Headlamps!” Sug answered, flicking his on and shining it in my eye to illustrate his point.

We lingered until 8pm, waiting for the rain to stop (which it did, turning first to a fine mist and then to a thick fog), the 28 miles we’d already hiked and the late night finally wearing on our muscles. We started hiking and quickly realized that in the dense darkness, our headlamps were almost useless. Pilgrim’s light was the brightest, so he led, the rest of us following along so closely that I could touch E’s pack in front of me. The hiking was tortuously slow, our moods swinging from slap happy song singing (“Night hiking, deserves a quiet night.”) to deeply depressed silence. It was during one of these silences that I ran into E’s pack, not realizing the three in front of me had stopped.

“Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.” E repeated in a low voice. I followed the weak beam of her light over to the right.

“HOLY SHIT.” I was looking at hundreds of eyes looking back at me, shining in the darkness.

“It’s deer.” Sug told us in an unsure voice.

“Go, go, go!” I urged, not wanting to find out who we were sharing the woods with.

It was midnight when we finally reached the shelter, finding that it was almost full with a group of sleeping high school kids. We silently unpacked and squeezed our sleeping bags into the space.

“Hey,” Pilgrim whispered, “We have something for you guys…for finishing your first 30 mile day.”

And then he and Sug each pulled out a bottle of beer from their packs and handed it to E and I.

“No way.” E said, sounding as touched as I was. “This is the best.”

It was such a sweet gesture, and a perfect end to an epic day. Had I not been so tired, I might have cried. Instead, I took a sip of the beer and passed the bottle to Sug.

“Oooooooh!” I whispered, “Like a mushroom truffle!”

To be continued…

We sat in the shelter on the morning of April 25th looking at the trail guides, trying to figure out our mileage for the day. The four of us, but mostly Pilgrim and E, who Sug and I deferred to when it came to mileage planning, decided to do 24 miles with a stop for dinner at mile 20 at Big Meadows- a lodge and restaurant in the national park. I felt really strong as we set out that morning. Pilgrim and I hiked ahead of E and Sug, E complaining that her knee was bothering her a little bit, something that was happening more and more frequently despite E’s insistence that nothing was seriously wrong. When E’s sister Cara had thru-hiked she’d developed a stress fracture on the top of her foot about halfway through her hike. She’d visited a doctor who told her to stay off it for a couple of weeks, then she’d laced up her boots a little tighter and kept hiking despite the pain. I couldn’t imagine E stopping for anything less. It made me think twice when I felt like complaining about my blisters that would never heal.

After a stop for lunch, the four of us set off together. I confessed to the group that sometimes when I hiked by myself I would think about what I would say in a submission tape for the Real World.

“They should do a Real World: AT.” Said Pilgrim.

I laughed. “Can you imagine anything more boring? So…they’re still walking…”

“Whatever. We’re fascinating.”

“Yeah, but we go whole days without talking to each other except at meals.” Sug pointed out.

“And I doubt anyone is as interested in poop as we are.” I said.

“Speaking off…” E said and motioned to me that she was going to take a pit stop.

Pilgrim, Sug and I walked on, hammering out the logistics of Real World: AT (“They’d have to get some super fit camera men.”). In the middle of our discussion on whether we would make more of an effort to clean ourselves if cameras were on us all the time, we came across a man with a huge walking stick, hiking in blue jeans. We chatted with him for a few minutes, discovering that he had thru-hiked years earlier. I looked over my shoulder several times, thinking E should have caught up with us by then.

“Hey, if you see a girl with red hair coming this way, will you tell her we’ll meet her at Big Meadows?” I asked the blue jeaned hiker, knowing that we weren’t far from our dinner stop and figuring she would catch up there.

Within 30 minutes we had reached Big Meadows, a complex consisting of several buildings with a bar, gift shop, restaurant and hotel rooms all in the beautiful old main lodge building. All three of us headed straight for the bank of pay phones that were located inside the building near the Tap Room. I spent twenty minutes talking to Kevin, and then went to look for E, thinking she was probably in the gift shop. I ran into Pilgrim walking back into the lodge.

“Where’s E?” He asked.

“What do you mean? I just got off the phone, you haven’t seen her?”

“No, I’m worried. She should have been here a long time ago.”

I could hear the panic in Pilgrim’s voice and I knew he was right, she shouldn’t have been more than five minutes behind us, but I wasn’t worried. E has a horrible sense of direction. Almost every time we’d come up a path from a shelter, she’d head the wrong way down the trail and I would just wait silently until she’d realize that I wasn’t behind her, then she’d yell “fuck!” and turn around. I figured that she had taken a wrong turn or ended up in the wrong building. Pilgrim said he and Sug would look around while I talked to the people in the lodge about where else she could have gone. A woman at the gift store told me that there was another store about a mile away that E could have gone to if she’d veered off the AT onto one of the many side trails that run through the park. I was feeling pretty confident that this was what happened and asked the woman to call down to the other store and ask them to look around for a red headed thru-hiker.

“Sorry, honey.” The woman said, as she hung up the phone.

“Wait? She’s not there?” I stammered and the woman shook her head apologetically, “Okay. Thank you for checking.”

I walked outside to look for the boys and a light rain started to fall. A small knot formed in my chest, worried for the first time. I didn’t really believe that anything bad had happened, still thinking that E was lost, but I knew now that we would need to go back out to look for her. It had been over an hour since we’d seen her. Pilgrim and Sug found me, having had no luck, and we hashed out a plan. Sug and I would backtrack up the trail, and Pilgrim would stay at the lodge in case E turned up there.

Pilgrim couldn’t contain his worry, “Be careful, you guys, it’s starting to get dark.”

“I’m sure she’s fine.” I reassured him, zipping up my raincoat. I felt a flash of annoyance, picturing E stubbornly walking the wrong way without me behind to redirect her.

Just then, a car stopped in front of us, and E popped out of the passenger seat carrying a six-pack of beer missing two and a gift shop bag full of half-eaten candy. The driver, an older man in a fleece jacket, opened the trunk and pulled out her pack and hiking sticks, setting them on the sidewalk. He gave E a quick wave and drove off.

“What. The. Fuck. Dude.” I yelled, feeling a mixture of relief and anger.

“Dude. You don’t even know.” She said, a smile on her face but giving me a look that shut me down immediately.

I walked over and hugged her, while Pilgrim and Sug gathered her stuff and ushered us inside. And then the story came pouring out. E had stopped to pee on the side of the trail, “and I guess I passed out, because the next thing I knew, this mother and son duo wearing matching American flag track suits were standing over me, shaking me, asking, ‘HONEY, HONEY, WHERE ARE YOU GOING?’ in like, a crazy southern accent and I thought I was hallucinating, but she kept saying “Where are you going?” and I was just like ‘I’M GOING TO MAINE!’, and that was the point when I realized I was lying on the fucking trail with my fucking pants around my ankles.”

E hadn’t known, but the site where her insulin pump connected to her body had been disconnected all day, meaning she had received no insulin, sending her blood sugar sky-rocketing. On top of that, she was super dehydrated, having run out of water earlier in the day but not wanting to take the time for a refill. When she squatted, those conditions combined to overwhelm her system and she’d passed out “MID FUCKING PEE!” “Team USA Hiking”, as E referred to them, had helped her to a road crossing and pointed her in the direction of a store, E thinking it was the one where we were supposed to meet. E had sat on the side of the road, given herself some insulin, drank some water, and then brushed herself off and walked down the road to the store.

“We called down there!” I exclaimed, not quite knowing what else to say.

“I don’t know, dude, I must have been on the phone or something. I thought I was waiting on you guys, since I walked down the road. I was just hanging out, eating Doritos and Twizzlers, drinking beer. When I came back in after using the phone, they told me you’d called down and that guy gave me a ride up here.”

When we finally stopped laughing (each time we’d stop, someone would yell “I’m going to Maine!” and we’d fall out all over again), Sug looked at E and said, “Jesus. Let’s get a drink.” He led us all towards the Tap Room.

We had just ordered food and were well on our way to getting drunk, when it finally hit me.

“You could have died!” I blurted.

“I know.” E said quietly. She broke into a big smile and raised her glass, “To Team USA Hiking!”

“Team USA Hiking!” We echoed. I smiled back at E. She was so incredibly tough that most of the time I forgot that she was diabetic, but I promised myself right then that I would never let her get behind me again.

“So…” E said with a wink, “We don’t really have to hike any more today, do we?”

Shenandoah National Park is one of the most populated sections of the trail due to its proximity to Washington DC, its accessibility and many amenities. Shenandoah is beautiful, but the Appalachian Trail doesn’t travel through many of the most scenic parts of the park. Instead, the A.T. follows closely along Skyline Drive, a winding road that cuts through the middle of Shenandoah, the trail crisscrossing the drive 30 times in 101 miles. In entering the park, it was the amenities that excited us- we read that all along the trail there were camp stores, restaurants and a even a lodge, and pictured ourselves eating our way through the relatively easy stretch of trail.

Our second day in the park we were up early, partly because it was a cold morning, partly because we had spent the night with a group of noisy high school aged kids and were eager to put some distance between us and them, but mostly because we read that there was a campground with a store seven miles up the trail. The four of us hiked together and it wasn’t until we were several miles into the day that I realized, for the first time, that I wasn’t struggling to keep up with the group. I’d felt myself getting stronger with each passing week, judging my progress on how easy it became to pass day and weekend hikers, but I consistently lagged behind Pilgrim, E and Sug. It wasn’t something new; I’d been slow my whole life. I was always one of the slowest kids in the 15 years I’d played soccer and softball; I’d resigned myself to being the slowest hiker early in the trip. And up until that point, I had been the slowest. I’d become accustomed to arriving for lunch or at shelters to find everyone waiting for me. I tried to not let it bother me, but the truth was, the truth I’m not sure I would have admitted to myself, was that every time I was the last one in, part of me was right back to being the embarrassed kid at soccer practice. If I had thought about it at the time, I would have realized how liberating it would be to not have to carry that self-imposed label anymore.

But my thoughts at that moment were not focused inward but to where they were ninety percent of the time I was hiking; on food. Which is why, when we arrived at the campground and found the store was not yet open for the season, we treated the disappointment with all the maturity of small children denied their favorite toys. It didn’t matter that we had food bags full of the same packaged foods the store would probably sell, there was a magic in buying and eating food you didn’t have to carry up and down mountains. We set back out onto the trail, mentally and probably literally kicking at the dirt. Soon, though, we crossed paths with a woman hiking the opposite direction who told E about a park restaurant and store a mile off the trail that we hadn’t known about and our faith in the universe was restored. Not only would we be getting food, but we’d be getting hot food and indoor plumbing and at that time in my life I’d have been hard pressed to think of something I valued more.

A half hour later, Pilgrim, Sug and I sat in a booth happily eating high school cafeteria grade hamburgers, when E emerged from the women’s restroom.

“Dude, don’t go in there.” She whispered in my ear. “Someone stopped that shit up.”

I laughed, knowing exactly who “someone” was, holding up my hand for a high five. Even if E and I hadn’t been friends since the seventh grade, her comment would have felt completely normal at that point in the hike. The frequency and openness with which backpackers talk about their bodily functions would make even the least squeamish in the “outside world” blush. When you have no privacy and limited facilities, where and when you choose to do your business is a source of constant concern and completely open for discussion. I could have pinpointed without hesitation the daily poop schedule of every person in our group and thought nothing of it (once in the morning was preferable, so you could get it out of the way at a privy).

We finished our meal and walked into the adjacent gift shop. I grabbed E’s arm and pointed out the caution tape that now blocked the entrance to the women’s room.

“What did you do?!” I giggled.

She just shrugged, continued looking at the candy selection and asked with a straight face, “What kind of fudge should I get?”

E and I stood at the counter to make our purchases (chocolate for me, rocky road for E) and overheard one young, disgusted looking employee telling another, “It was like a baby’s arm. Who DOES THAT?”

When we finally recovered our composure, E said thoughtfully, “It’s a rare thing to overhear a stranger talking about your shit. Is it weird that I feel kinda proud?”

“Oh my god. This really is the Shitendoahs!” I laughed, referring to the name I’d given the park earlier that day, since eating more town food was throwing off my routine and making me thankful for the increased access to restrooms and privies that being in a populated part of the trail provided. It was almost as if my nickname supplied a theme for our time in the park and we were determined to live up to it. I continued to proudly make use of every privy I passed. And then to cap it off, on our last day in Shenandoah, I was walking down a hill when I spotted E, ten feet off the trail, barely concealed behind a rock, squatting with her pants around her ankles.

She looked up to see me, and not realizing the headphones I wore were off, yelled, “MY ASS…IS…EXPLODING!”

What she did not take into account was that it was a sunny, Saturday afternoon, that we were two miles from a road, and in one of the most popular parks on the trail. So maybe she could have anticipated, but definitely did not know that at the moment she was looking at me, yelling about her ass exploding, I was locking eyes with an attractive man in his mid-twenties hiking up the trail from the opposite direction who was also within earshot of her pronouncement. He gave me the slightest bemused smile and carried on up the trail, mercifully being careful not to look too long in E’s direction.

“Dude. We all hear you. And see you.” I told E when I stopped laughing.

“Jesus. Of course it had to be a hot guy. There was no time!” E was finishing up her business when a family with two young children passed by, making no qualms about staring her way.

“What?” She barked.

That image of E behind the rock, yelling at me about her ass, to this day makes me laugh almost as hard as the day it happened. In any other stretch of trail, that and the baby’s arm would have been the most significant stories we’d have to tell (not that I don’t take every chance to relate both, and E, to her credit, always laughs).

But they both became footnotes to our time in Shenandoah, because three days earlier one of us had almost died.

To be continued…

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…