SNP Hike Day 8: The Voyage Home

Saturday, 13th of September, 2003

It was another usual night on the trail in the Gravel Springs Shelter: Even without anyone else in the shelter with me snoring or moving around, with no mice running around, and a very gentle relaxing sound of rain on the roof, yet I still spend the night surfing back and forth between sleep and half-awakefulness. In the morning, I have that same slightly odd feeling of having had a night of rest and yet as if I was awake all night.

After getting up, I head out to the bear pole to retrieve my food bag and get a simple breakfast of a fruit bar and water. The rain has eased off a great deal, but there is still a good deal of mist in the air and light rain showers come and go. But it is light. I can see when I get to the pole that the authors of the guide to setting up the line were not kidding. The ground around the pole is strewn with trash from critters getting into bags and ripping through whatever they found there. I diligently collect up the trash and add it to my collection, in the process finding the missing caribiner from last night that slipped off the line after bouncing off my head. No good deed goes unnoted, I guess. Good to have that back again. Now I can attach my sandals to the outside of my pack and look the studdly AT hiker than I am not.

Daylight of course came a long way before 10 AM, the meeting time I set up with Meredith, so I sit in the shelter out of the rain and read the shelter log a bit more, which is entertaining reading. Bored people with a lot of creativity and not a lot of outlets have been here... There are drawings, poems, stories, odd dialogues with imaginary people which I cannot follow, in amongst the mundane enteries of mundane events. Came, eat lunch, left. Kind of like a weblog, except it reads in chronological order instead of reverse chronological order.

10 AM comes and there’s no Goddess of Mercy and Rescue (known to the rest of the world as Meredith), so I conclude it is time to grab the backpack, don the evil hiking boats once again, and head up to the parking lot about a quarter mile up the road. My bung leg is much better after a night of rest, but there is still a strange twinge with each step and I’m really hoping that Meredith is not keen to hike as I will feel guilty trying to talk her out of it. The blisters have huge patches of moleskin to cover them, at least.

Meredith is at her car waiting, but just about to head down the trail to the shelter. My fresh clean clothes and the shower last night have helped things a good deal, but I am sure I am not exactly at my finest: Good thing she is already a good friend as I look a bit scraggely with a week of beard. My beard, I should add, is a bit like my scalp: dense in spots, sparse in others. There is a reason I do not sport a beard regularly!

Meredith is clearly geared up to go since she could never make the message in my calls suggesting the hike will not happen. She has clearly got a fair bit of new gear for the hiking trip about which she is enthusiastic. Or she would be, if it wasn’t raining. Talking her out of the weekend trip down to Tom Floyd Shelter is wonderfully simple.

I toss my pack into the back of her car. This turns out to be a slightly interesting feat. Meredith is a fairly small woman and has a very quiet demure manner for the most part (a smile is her natural state of being) and a light foot on the pedal. So this low slung sleek sports car is a bit of a misnomer. I’ve never understood the purchase as it seemed rather out of character. But she loves her Eclipse and I cannot say too much. My grandmother got her first new car when she was in her late 70s: A deep orange-red Pontiac Firebird. There is no accounting for fancy...

We drive back down out of the park and onto the Interstate back towards Washington while Meredith fills me in on all the news of the world in the past week. There’s a big hurricane stirring its way to the U.S. (which will strike Maryland some five days later, with devasting results), President Bush is alas still with us, but Jonny Cash is not: After his wife died earlier in the year, he lost a good deal of his will to live and stopped taking care of himself, a fatal move in a diabetic.

I manage to reach Melissa at home in Washington with Meredith’s ‘phone (my lump I’ve dragged through the woods all week is completely dead at this point) and let her know that I’m coming a day earlier than planned. Melissa warns me that “I’ll have a surprise, but don’t worry it doesn’t involve the car.” Hmm... Good thing about it not being the car: A careless driver in her neighborhood managed to knock the side mirror off her ex-boyfriend’s car parked on the side of the street not so long ago.

One surprise is that there is a Howard football game about to go on when we get to Melissa’s house, about a block from the stadium, so Meredith is unable to park and come in with me and finally meet Melissa’s cats. Melissa works with cat rescue a great deal and Meredith loves cats, so she is interested. Not to mention that Meredith loves the idea of living in the city and this would be a chance to see the home of a friend there for the first time. But not this time: Meredith drops me off and I head in and say hello.

Turns out there are a few surprises. The first is that Melissa has found a new housemate, the terribly attractive and probably too young (ah, rationalize the rejection...) for me Erica. And my first impression is a smelly be-bearded straggly man with a limp. Ah well.

Erica moved in during the past week and came with her cat Inego. I call him the stretch limo of cats: Inego is a beautiful sleek black cat that is just amazingly long in his body. Even monster Zorro looks short next to this guy. One of Melissa’s cats, Carlyse waddles up for her attention once she works out that I’m a known okay person again. Zorro, Carlyse, Inego... that’s three black cats plus tabby Stripes. So why are there five black cats? It is confusing at first: everywhere you look there is a black cat and you are wondering “Okay, which one is this?” Chocolate siamese Carmel is hiding in the basement in the rafters where he has been staying pretty much all week, though Melissa has been able to reach up and pet him and he is not acting like he is suffering... just uninterested in coming down and being social.

Seven cats! You wonder how she manages...



Bobby and Belinda (months later at home in Odenton)


Turns out the answer is not without some issues. The two little black cats are Bobby and Belinda, kittens that Melissa rescued from the street a month or so ago and whom I had met before and forgotten about. They seem to be sisters about six months or so old whom some never-to-be-sufficiently-damned twit abandoned and whom stuck together with each other through the hardship on the streets. They have been growing well now they are in a home and getting reacquianted with being around people. They look very strange with the shaved patches on their sides from the neutering surgery.

It turns out that Zorro has been a bit of pest to the other cats (no surprise there) and Melissa thinks that in the future, I should look into getting cat sitter since having him in the house with her girls and Inego has been a bit much. Fair enough. But Bobby and Belinda have also stirred things up with Stripes in particular, so I have a three for one offer I cannot refuse: Zorro has been triplicated and I have three black cats now. And as it turns out, that is all I will leave with: Carmel refuses to come out where he can be reached, even for me, so he gets left behind to be caught at a later time and brought home (and this indeed does happen a few days later). Bobby and Belinda mewl like it is the end of the world coming home in the car: Clearly they remember being carried away and abandoned after their last car trip and very very unhappy. But after a cleanup, they start to install themselves in the house and within days, accept me and establish that they are queens and alpha cats and Zorro and Carmel are their underlings. Surprisingly enough, this works out fine. Months later when it is time to find them a real permanent home together somewhere, I am very sorry to see them leave and the house will seem empty with just two cats. But that is far in the future.

Personally, though, as soon as the two kittens are cleaned up and in the house and have learned where the litter boxes and food dishes are located, it is serious bath time for me. A glass of a nice red wine, a plate of cheese and crackers, and a tub full of hot sudsy bathwater... ah, it is heaven on Earth.

And thus, for the most part, ends my journey through Shenandoah National Park on the Appalachian Trail. Five days later, Hurricane Isabel would slam into the area and take out electrical power for several days, which was just fine with Bobby and Belinda who knew no better and just thought it was wonderful to have the guest human in the house all the time for four days straight. Wind damage and water logged ground turned soft by the rain would cause major tree downings in the park, which was closed to the public for weeks after the storm, though Skyline Drive would be opened in sections as crews cleared the road.




Tree blown down by Hurricane Isabel in Shenandoah National Park near Pass Mountain


A week after Isabel, I would go back to the park to work with the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club to clear trees from the trails, feeling that I owed the park something back for the wonderful experience it gave me hiking through it. A week later still, I would backpack the last section from Gravel Springs Shelter to Tom Floyd Shelter and back with my good friend J.R./Easy, taking one of the side trails around on the way down to add distance and variety. The trees were down and uncleared there off the Appalachian Trail, so it was an interesting hike. We even came on bear cubs just off the trail at one point. We also ran into John McCrae, the SNP North District manager with PATC, who asked me to count the downed trails on the last part of the AT out to Floyd Shelter, which seemed to impress Easy (the knowing Jim McCrae part, not my ability to count to six! Or was it eight?). On the basis of this encounter, Easy recommended that I become a Volunteer Coordinator for the Maryland Outdoor Club, which I have (at the date of this writing) now been doing for about nine or ten months. So the hike has cast a longer shadow on my life than just a pleasant little walk in the woods.

And as for Meredith and her adventure, about another month or so on yet still, she and I and Easy and my friend Gina (the one with the knife Pizza Slayer) would do a wonderful weekend hike from the Jim and Molly Denton Shelter a day’s hike north of Tom Floyd Shelter, hike through the fall colours through Manassass Gap, the Thompson Wildlife Management Area and its gaggle of enthusiastic hunters, to stay at Dick’s Dome just south of Sky Meadows State Park. So she did get in her hike and the chance to use all that new gear and enjoy the experience, though at ten miles she was ready to be done and had Easy proposed marriage when she showed up and he handed her an unexpected Guiness kept cold in the stream, I think she just might have accepted. He didn’t, she didn’t, but there was no leftover beer and Meredith will hear no evil spoken of J.R. ever since.

Jesse a.k.a. “Red Sock”