Project Eveningland

3/28/2023 Tuesday

I wish I could share with you, just as an intellectual exercise, the feeling of losing your phone or not having a way to recharge it while you are alone out in the woods. Boomers and older folks may find it difficult to identify with this feeling. The next several paragraphs may cause the ghost of Edward Abbey to throw up a little in his mouth (which, honestly, good).

Aside: my beef with Edward Abbey is his intolerable snobbishness and purism. Hard pass. Humans need nature. Humans have to engage with nature on varied but humane terms—that is the only way it’ll happen. The problem with National Parks infrastructure—the kind Abbey abhorred—was in its execution, not the philosophy of access. Instead of building monstrous highways [e.g., Trail Ridge Road in my neck of the woods], you could easily build zero emission shared transit, expand the number of trails accessible to those who use mobility devices, and build sustainable, resilient trails that stand up to erosion because they’re built on sane grades. Sometimes I just get so tired of Old Nature Men who’ve come down from on high to lecture us. I’m ready for a more sophisticated conversation about the human-nature interface. For example, Leave No Trace (LNT), though useful and relatively simple, is built on a Cartesian man/nature dichotomy that, while not nuts, does inspire in me a general sense of we can do better. Sorry for the long aside (but not really; it’s been eating away at me!)

It—the feeling of losing my phone—happened once to me while I was on the Colorado Trail in 2020. I was talking to Mom on the phone while walking the descent to Mt. Princeton Springs resort. Don’t let the name fool you; it is an isolated place. My phone slipped out of my hand and hit the rocks. I thought it might be broken and felt a terrible pang of separation. But it wasn’t broken. The relief was extreme!

Last night I felt that feeling again when I discovered that my electronics bag (including my battery bank and all my charging cords) had gotten mixed in with Mom and Dad’s stuff back at the rental and was already back in Ohio with them. Here on the AT, I had 32% battery left on my phone. It at first frightened me. Then I thought about it. I still have the phone and am a short day’s walk (nine miles) from a little resort (Black Bear Resort) that I had wanted to revisit anyway. Here’s my excuse. I called around (thus using more precious battery) to see if anyone (area shuttlers, hostels) could sell me a battery bank. Black Bear Resort had a small one laying around they could give me. 5000mah.

So it’s really no big deal. But if you think about what emotions are—in part at least, little chemical squirts and such in our bodies—you can see that a mood shift like that is gonna stick around when there’s nothing and no one else there to distract you. And I couldn’t just write to distract myself either, because I had to save battery for tomorrow (today). (Yes, I have a pen and paper, but have you ever written an essay longhand in a tiny notebook after a 16 mile day?). I wondered too at sleeping alone in the woods—I don’t need any more reasons to feel vulnerable out here in the dark. It’s darker than normal because my headlamp was in the electronics bag! I have no flashlight except on my phone which must be kept off to preserve battery! Once it was dark, I was in the dark.

But I slept fine. I woke up a few times feeling too hot but I mostly forgot I was alone in the woods. Folks, this is not a small thing. The first few dozen times I slept alone in the woods I had to medicate myself to sleep. The difficulty when you’re alone is in relaxing those instincts which pre-date humanity’s life indoors. They say, you can’t fall asleep alone out here! You’ll be too vulnerable! I guess after a while that deadens just a little. Took seven years for me but more frequent trips would have gotten me there faster. (For The Last of Us fans: just pretend you have Joel keeping watch. Nope, don’t do that, you’ll be afraid of mushroom zombies!)

My ankle is feeling much better this morning. It’s catching up now that I’m no longer walking in two shapeless leathery sacks that used to be shoes.

One struggle I’m having right now is hunger. My body burns through food like a wood stove burns through paper. I have to keep stopping to eat, and my mood has become even more tethered to my appetite lately. Yes, I could eat while walking, but do you know how hard it is to breathe around a mouthful of nuts?

Anyway, I’m gonna have to rethink my snack protocols because the big bags of seeds and nuts have got to go, at least for a while. I’m not any more sick of them than I was at the start of the hike, but I think my gut microbiome is saying, “fucking enough with all the seeds and nuts!” Will still eat peanut butter. Going to add back in some more cheeses, including Parmesan crisps which I can temporarily eat consequence free! Those things are a perfect backpacking food: super lightweight, hideously caloric, loaded with protein, easy to eat because the umami hits your brain like a drug.

I had a nice leisurely nine mile walk across quiet, breezy ridges then traversed soft, newly built switchbacks—not soft in a good way, more like uneven. It clouded over and cooled down. I put my Melanzana knockoff back on to warm up.

Made it to Black Bear after a .4 mile road walk. The place was quiet indeed. Decided to stay and eat some heavy freezer food and get good sleep and recharge everything. Met Linda, half of the married couple that owns it, who’d been in the hospital when I was here back in 2021. Very glad she came through OK! She sold me an old iPhone charging cable, pulled from a cloudy plastic jar and untangled from others (ruefully, while sorting through: “I can’t sell you this one—it’s our longest one”). I liked her right away: detail oriented, a little bit fussy—my kind of people. I had this amazing oven pizza for a late lunch. Spent time lying around in my little set of rooms by the rushing creek (I sprung for accommodations with a private bathroom and kitchenette).

This short day will put me a bit behind my plans to catch Hide, L&F, and Wedge. I think I can still catch them by Damascus (perhaps just in time for a Damascene conversion!). But if not I’ll catch them soon after.

Black Bear is one of my trail favs. As Wedge put it, “all the YouTubers go to Boots Off Hostel” (more famous, nine miles ahead). Yes, they do. But the cool kids—those of us who aren’t starfuckers—stay at Black Bear.