Had I set out on April first, I think I would have taken The April Fool as my trail name. But I don't think of foolishness in a pejorative sense but rather in the openness and fumbling we find ourselves in when first heading off to college or starting music lessons. As a thought, a hope for some small salvation, I jumped eagerly at the idea of hiking the trail. As a quickly approaching reality, I had to wrestle with the emotional turmoil of opening oneself to and shrank a little. But few times in my life have I experienced the exhilaration I felt on the cold and misty morning when I took the right fork of the trail up to Springer Mountain, leaving family, friends, comfort, safety?, and routine down the left. I hiked over thirteen miles my first day, sped along by this energy and hurried by the hope of outdistancing a creature come right out of trail lore that I had run into the night before I had even stepped on the trail. A creature named Elmer.
My dad and I stayed at the Hike Inn Lodge a few miles off the approach trail along with about 30 other hikers who were there for the weekend. Of them all, I was the only prospective thru-hiker, except for this shifty, somewhat muddled, somewhat paunchy, sixty year old. When pressed about where he was from or how far he planned on going, he didn't give a very coherent answer. He apparently started somewhere in Alabama, on ??? trail and was going until his body couldn't go anymore. The night before, he apparently hadn't had any food, and he mentioned one time when he ate a packet of instant oatmeal dry. He seemed to be a sponger and a bit of a con man. I saw him take out four rolls from the dining hall, presumably his dinner for the next? days, unless he could get some somewhere else. I wasn't sure whether he paid for a room at the inn, or, as you can at many places, he had worked for stay and a meal. He wasn't quite clueless, and while at dinner, my dad and I chatted with a French-German couple about various places in Europe, and it seemed that one of his eleven brothers and sisters had something quite generic to say about each place we mentioned ("yeah, he said it was really beautiful there"). He had also apparently walked much of the trail before but was unspecific about which parts.
Well, at some point during the dinner, I heard his name for the first time, and gears in my head clicked. I remembered there was a character in a trail memoir I had read by a guy who hiked in 2003 who was a trail con man - generally unpleasant to be around, never gave a straight story, had lots of brothers and sisters, mooched his way along the trail, and was arrested at one point for stealing gear from hikers as they slept - named, best as I can remember, Elmer (though a con man might change his name). As we set out from the inn that first morning, he said to me, "It's easy to get lost on this trail. Stick close to me, and I'll take care of you."
I had told my dad what I suspected and asked him to check the book when he got home. As we had three miles to the trail that morning, when we set out, my dad and I legged it and left Elmer behind, said our goodbyes, and then I headed for Springer. Well there wasn't much of a view at the top, but I met some other excited hikers and got a picture.
I figured I had well outpaced old Elmer, and several more miles down the trail, I stopped with a few other hikers for lunch. They all packed out pretty quickly while I lingered over lunch a bit long - too long. As I made my way back onto the trail, I found old Elmer there. He didn't seem to need lunch and set off with me. I tried to drop him several times but never quite could, it seemed. One time I was well ahead of him but made a wrong turn, and sure enough he was there when I found the trail again. I began to get a bit worried, but there were other people all around, and I figured I wasn't too bad off. Funny that much as I tried to drop him, I saw him most my first four days.
When my dad got back and checked the book, he determined that Elmer was not the con man from the book. Elmer was a nice guy who ran a hostel somewhere in Va., I think, and Mac was the con man. My Elmer, though, was creepy enough that I didn't feel bad about having thought so of him. I was a mixture of of pity and relief, though, when I saw him the fourth day getting off the trail due to knee troubles.
Those first few days, I didn't fall in with anyone for very long but enjoyed those I did walk with. I outpaced pretty much everyone I saw, as I was grinding up mountains and running down them, which, of course, led to my own knee trouble. While making the hiking something of a grind, joint pain made me actually slow down a bit. For a while I had to resort to cane to help get around. Unfortunately the woods were not similarly helpful in providing top hat and monocle. And when not pretending to be an English dandy on a thru-hike, I did my best to imitate Luke Kelly belting out the lines to (
Raglan Road). Though, for the first two days I had that song in my head, I couldn't remember the third verse, and I had no way to figure it out. A common frustration on the trail.
More later.
