The Rock of Love

Originally written 1st of September, 2003

Not far from my home, there is a very nice pleasant trail through the woods. But it is a trail with a little catch: it’s more than 900 miles one way to the nearest end to the south, while its northern terminus is perhaps a third yet still further away in Maine. I speak, of course, of the amazing edifice known as the Appalachian Trail. I learned of it some years ago and began taking little day hikes on the trail, taking in the entire state of Maryland on the trail in the course of a year of these little hikes. And gradually the trail took hold of me.

This is a dangerous condition. Every year roughly 2000 souls with that same grip launch themselves northward at the crack of spring from Springer Mountain in Georgia. These people have set aside their life for the next several months to the task of walking along the eastern shore of the United States in a mad race to reach the towering edifice of Mt. Katahdin at the far end before winter in Maine closes Baxter State Park in October. They are also racing on a shorter term against the coming of summer in the south when the hiking becomes miserably sweaty: getting as far north as possible before the humidity and heat becomes unbearable is another major objective.

By mid June, the survivors of this initial barrage flow through northern Virginia and Maryland, by which time slightly more than three quarters of them have come to their senses and given up. Their numbers will dwindle further, with just a tenth of the original hikers reaching the icy goal of Katahdin... where they will then have to turn around and come back since the trail’s end is at a peak with no other access, so it is back down the trail to the nearest road to make an exit. Just like Georgia, in fact: It is a day’s hike into the woods just to reach the start of the trail somewhat in the middle of nowhere. It’s not the most promising of starts.

A couple of years after I began my little strolls in the woods, another writer in New Hampshire took note of the trail in his own backyard and became possessed of that same notion as I and so many others to hike this monument of human folly. He failed, quite utterly, and wrote a wonderful and entertaining novel about the hiking attempt called A Walk in the Woods. A friend, and not a hiking friend mind you, complained that the book was misleading in that you did not find until the end that they did not succeed.

These two failures, mind you (the author got a buddy to hike with him), managed to walk some 800 miles of the trail, including a goodly portion of the ominious Hundred Mile Wilderness in Maine near the the trail’s end, where the black flies swarm so thickly that they annually carry off two or three backpackers into the woods.

Only the crazed standards of the 2150+ mile long AT hiker would call such people failures.

I did point out to my non-hiking friend that you knew things were not going to work out well when the author’s overweight hiking partner arrived in New Hampshire with a huge bag of Little Debbie snacks to tithe him over.

The book was a smash hit and the author, Bill Bryson, has almost become a household name. Mention “Appalachian Trail” to almost anyone who has been the arms of the trail at some point or another, and their favorite character or part of Bryson’s novel spouts forth. I would not have had to read the book at all for all I have heard about it from others in the last two years. Merely say the words “Never, ever, make me feel guilty about eating pie!” to a hiker and you are liable to get a giggle and be regaled with the rest of the story around that quote.

My personal favorite: “If you meet a bear, do not climb a tree. You will just end up fighting the bear in the tree.”

Lest someone ever tell you that literature cannot change the world, this book is a lesson warning. That figure of perhaps 2000 hikes a year was the number before Bryon’s book went into print. When A Walk in the Woods came out in hardcover shortly after his hiking misadventures, the numbers skyrocketed: people came from all over the world to explore this trail after reading about it. Now I hike my little sections and find myself at odd times face to face with half-starved men with flowing beards and cakes of salt crystals from their own sweat on their pack straps and that special scent only emitted by hikers who have not showered in at least a week, who turn out to be from Dunedin on the South Island of New Zealand and whom just dropped everything to hike this trail after reading about it.

Finally this year after a several year peak, the number of thru-hikers (the special name for those who hike the entire trail in one fell swoop) has begun to fall. But amongst those heard heard the siren call is a friend of mine, whom we shall “Easy.”

Let me explain: he is a nice and very easy going person and this may even be why he has this name. I didn’t give it to him. He certainly did not give it to himself. Macaroni did. As in Macaroni and Angel Hair, the Noodle Heads. I have no idea where they got their names either. I have never met them and perhaps never will. I certainly do not know their real names or lives: they could be my next door neighbours for all I know, or perhaps the next door neighbours of those wild Dunedin men. One of those strange traditions that most follow on the AT is to have a “trail name.” My working theory is that this is to make it easier to hide from the law, but it is just a theory. And Easy might have got his name just for the humour of watching him come into camp and introduce himself: “Hi! I’m Easy!”

A trail name is usually given to you by another hiker for something distinctive you do or some characteristic trait. Easy is trying to peg me: “French Press” for the coffee plunger I brought backpacking recently. He thought it a ridiculous thing to pack. He was right, but I did so enjoy that first cup of coffee in the morning. Another hiker found my red hiking socks quite a source of merriment and so “Red Sock” has floated. I think I had better go with that before Macroni meets me and dubs me with moniker like “Loose” just to see what happens...

Another friend on the same french press hike has no trail name, but she carried a rather spectacular knife in her pack, probably best suited to skinning deer. She thought it would be fun to make a pizza on the trail, but the only impliment in the house even vaguely like a pizza cutter was this huge deer knife of her brother’s. Never mind the logic of baking a pizza on the trail. The knife got christined “Pizza Slayer.” It must be a humbling experience to have your cutlery to have a name when you do not. Rather like waking up to find that someone has narrowed the intellectual gap between you and your credenza.

So I have heard the siren song of the trail and have been gradually hiking off sections of it. I am about to spend a week in the woods hiking the 100 miles or so that runs through the Shenandoah National Park. Last year I hiked south from the Maryland border through West Virginia and northern Virginia in a series of day hikes that took me to the northern end of the park. At this pace, my approach, called section hiking, will take in the entire trail in the next 20 years or so: a good lifelong goal in some ways.

Easy points out this is actually the hard way to do it: After a week or so of hiking, you settle into a routine and your body has adjusted to the fact that you’ve decided to do the energetic equivalent of a couple of marathons a day. It takes a while, but the entire body shifts into this new mode of operation where you are burning something of the order of twice your usual load, right up at the theoretical maximum of what the body can do, putting right in the league with cyclists on the Tour de France. Only much much slower. Lance Armstrong would kick out the entire AT in a couple of weeks. And my way, of little hikes lasting a day and then turning around to go back to the car, means not climatizing to the hiking, but doing this twice, since after hiking 7.5 miles one way, you have to hike back again to get to the car. That’s ten million steps to Easy’s five million. And he’s younger than me. And he’s already done the entire thing. Clearly it would seem that I am doing this entirely the wrong way. But then again, my approach is more compatible with having something else to life than the trail. Like a job. And a mortgage. And much smaller cat sitting bills: you can ask a friend to look after the two ravenous beasts for a week, but five months?

Easy has also been telling me about the traditions and patterns of the trail. Like trail names. Or the fellow named Strider who took off through the trail at a great pace, in no small measure because he never carried more than a day pack and was met each day by a driver who took him to the nearest town where Strider stayed in the local motel on a soft bed in a comfortable room with showers and other standard amenities. It must be nice to have money: Strider happens to be the CEO of a large U.S. supermarket chain. By all reports, a nice person. But a CEO named after a Lord of the Rings character who rises to become King of Gondor and throw down Sauron, the most powerful foe of all that is Good in the Middle Earth? This supermarket chain just bought out a major alternative food supplier in Iowa that had been a mainstay of the community for decades and threatened to close it down if the town did not hand over major tax breaks. I detect the hand of Mordor, not Gondor, here.

Beyond trail names, there are more pleasant traditions. In northern Virginia, there is a hostel specifically for thru-hikers and others hiking the trail. In early July, as the hikers stream through the Blackburn Center on their way to make Harper’s Ferry for the 4th of July, there is a traditional big barbeque dinner for all the hikers. A couple of weeks later, as the same sorry lot arrive in central Pennsylvania and reach the halfway point on the trail, it is time for the Half Gallon Challenge: eat a half gallon of ice cream in the fastest time possible. Easy managed this in something like fifteen minutes.

That might not sound all that impressive, but consider what sheer guttony it is to sit down and eat an entire pint of ice cream. Now multiple that by four. Kind of incredible, isn’t it? What’s even more incredible is that these people are burning calories so prodigiously that an event like this is largely a threat of ice cream headaches: they will not be feeling fat or gluttonous the next day and that ice cream will be hiked off in good order. There are those who have been known to ask for more...

Or take the interesting habit of some hikers to go “yogi-ing.” Not the Indian meditation and body bending: think Yogi Bear from the cartoon. People in the more crowded parts of the trail, of which there are quite a few, are often fascinated to meet a thru-hiker and love to talk to them about their experiences and how they got into all this and so on. But some hikers are a sly lot: they want something in it for them, and find ways to slightly evasive and talking about how hungry they get to be with all the hiking (which is a convincing act, mind you: these folks are skinny as a rake by the time New Hampshire comes around), and don’t really talk unless they get food. A sort of fine specialized begging, if you will, for which there are rich rewards for the food giver (please keep in mind, I intend to be one of those thru-hikers. Be kind to them and pack some extra cheese and beer. Please do feed these animals.).

Something about thru-hiking also brings out the best in others. Easy and his cohikers (He was not consciously hiking with any one set of people, but since the pace is more or less comparable and people keep similar schedules, it is not unusual to see the same people several times over for an extended period of time.) got asked by a guy at one point over to dinner. He served up a good barbeque, gave them guests rooms for the night, a good breakfast, and dropped them off back at the trail, all for the price of good company and nothing else. Yet this kindness is so common, there is a special name for it: Trail magic. It might be as simple as coming to a shelter and finding that someone has left a novel sitting in the shelter for anyone to take and read. Keep in mind these are people who hike all day and often having gone twelve to twenty miles, still have daylight left, but no energy to go anywhere. An intellectual gift (if an old Star Trek novel can so be refered) is trail magic indeed. So might a newspaper: world events come and go without impinging much on the trail. Other times it might be some odd piece of gear from one hiker that they have decided they no longer want (usually because it is just frigging heavy, like a nice double walled stainless steel coffee mug) and leave for someone else. The Blackburn Center a day shy of Harper’s Ferry has a small locker with such things: in its grasp on my last visit were three books, a few odd implements like discarded spoons, and until recently before our visit, the aforementioned mug. The caretaker was surprised that such an object had made it as far north as the center... and that anyone would take it. Rumour has it that there is an outdoors supplier in Georgia who walks the AT about a week or so behind the first batch of thru-hikers and collects all the bits and pieces of gear they have tossed aside by trail. So cute little trowels for digging a latrine in the woods go to the wayside (A week in, you realize a stick will do the same and you don’t have to carry it to the spot.), as do spare tent pegs, perhaps whole tents, and some other things hard to believe. One hiker started off with an axe on his pack, thinking he’d have to chop wood all the way to Maine to make a campfire each night. I do hope someone introduced him to the wonders of a camp stove.

There’s even a oft-repeated claim that they found scuba gear on the trail one year. Maybe no one told them that there is now a bridge across the Delaware and you need not be stuck with poor George Washington's precendent setting decision at the river cross: Row versus Wade? He didn’t bring scuba gear either.

However, it turns out that trail magic, like so many other things, does have a potential dark side. And this is where the Rock of Love comes in.

Another one of those strange tradition of hikers is to pick up a stone at Springer Mountain and carrying it north with them to leave on Katahdin. A very small stone, mind you: it’s a bloody long way with lug a boulder and the pack is already pretty heavy, especially at the trail’s start, with other far more critical things like sleeping bags and tents and axes and scuba gear and such. All told, a full pack could be anywhere from 30 to 40 pounds and that is a one serious amount of weight to find out one morning you have gained in one fell swoop and now must lug through the equivalent of some 300 marathons. So if there is one thing you really do not need, it is a rock.

Especially a four pound rock.

But there was evil afoot that day. Macaroni spotted this particular four pound wonder and plucked it from the soil of northern Georgia and engraved on it the words “The Rock.” Attached was a small note on a rubber band reading “I am the Rock of Love. I am trying to reach Katahdin, but I have no arms or legs. Will you carry me?”

Now I should say here that Macaroni had no intention of personally carrying this crag through the woods northward. The idea was that each person who found it in their pack one day would then sneak the rock into another person’s pack the next. But also remember my earlier comment about people tending to hike together and at roughly the same pace. So the Rock of Love got passed around the same people for a while before escaping into a new circle where it circulated as it gradually worked its way northward.

Thru-hikers are a truly weird lot, though. Some had exactly the reaction you would expect finding an extra four pounds of boulder in their pack at the end of the day: Anger and disgust. One friend to whom I passed on this story likened it to a sexually transmitted disease: something you share that your partner really wishes you hadn’t. Except unlike an STD (unless I really have my biology all wrong), this is a burden shifted when shared rather than spread. Perhaps not quite an epidemic, though a single exposure does not garnish you with any resistance to future exposure... unless you were very wary.

But while some were dismayed, others “got in the spirit of it.” Or maybe got whacked in the head with a few too many boulders. Who knows? But at many of the shelters on the trail that year, the logbook would have an entry in handwriting about the day’s hike or other events, signed “The Rock.” So even those not carrying the rock, like the Noodle Heads, were able to follow some of its adventures from behind.

It got discarded in a privy at one point, for example (I am praying they meant BY a privy, not DOWN the privy) and had to be rescued. And it managed a reasonable and stately progress up the trail northward.

I should at this point apologize for an obvious oversight: I’ve not said anything about that very special bunch of people whom travel north to south, starting in Maine instead of Georgia. They start hiking three or four months later in the year, late enough that the black flies of spring in Maine have died down and the snow has cleared off most of the path in the White Mountains in New Hampshire. By the time they reach the south, summer is well and truly gone and they face slogging through snow and ice in the last month or two in North Carolina and Georgia if they have not hiked fast enough. Less than a tenth as many people start from the north as the south each year, and statistics for reaching the far end are only slightly better, and largely then only because only the most hardy and determined of souls will even try that approach in the first place. I spoke with one hiker who was one of only nine people who started from the north end of the AT in 1981. Three of them made it to the southern end.

The price of this non-conformist approach is that many traditions are lost on them: the Blackburn Center is still open by the time they reach it, but many other such hostels and other features southward are closing for the season by the time the hikers reach them. People who have opened their hearts and doors to the northward bound hikers fail to do the same to the southward types. Not out of unkindness, but sheer ignorance: no one realizes they are coming.

And so they miss the half gallon challenge and barbeque and 4th of July in Harper’s Ferry. It is not unusual for them to carry a little piece of Katahdin southward, thus in very small measure keeping the mountain from growing from stones cast upon its peak from Georgia. But they do miss such things as the Rock of Love.

Much of the hike, the Noodle Heads were ahead of the rock and unaware of its progress save by rumour and the tale now and again from others hiking faster northward. After all, The Rock of Love had a few more “zero days” (as days when a hiker chooses to take a break and make no forward progress is called). But late in the year, Macaroni suffered some foot problems and had to pull himself off the trail for a while to rest and heal. And while the Noodle Heads were off the trail, the Rock of Love continued its northward march and overtook them. So when they came back, there were the log enteries from the Rock ahead of them. And gradually as they were working their way northward, they got nearer and nearer.

The last night before Easy and the Noodle Heads, who were hiking together at this point, reached Katahdin, Angel Hair pulled Easy aside to share a surprise she had.

She had the Rock of Love. It had shown up in her pack the night before. And so the plot was laid.

Three days before Baxter State Park would close for the winter, and in horrible weather that was almost, but not quite, enough to close the trail to public access, they were to set up to the peak to finish their hike. That the morning, Macaroni must have thought his companions were going nuts. They asked him to help with simple silly things like checking a pack or asking about a bootstring or duct tape or whatever... anything to get him away from his own pack for a few critical moments while the Rock of Love could be slipped into the top, yet late enough in the packing that he would not find it while finishing his own packing.

2150 miles and change after starting in Georgia, and in the worst weather possible, they succeeded in a five month long goal and summited the mountain. And there after suitable self-congratulations, Angel Hair became a little speech about love and life and coming full circle. Macaroni started to look a little worried, like perhaps his wife was suffering exposure from the weather or going a little soft and strange on the new age silliness... but after finishing her talk, she asked him to open his pack.

Where he found it.

So should you find a stone upon the peak of Katahdin in Maine engraved “The Rock” and wonder... It is the Rock of Love and it has no arms or legs, but would very much like it if you would take it home to Georgia now.