Lousy customer service with UPS

I am a reasonable person (I think): when someone screws up, I will ask for and accept an apology and move on. But recently UPS screwed up and it created a lot of trouble... and the company refused to acknowledge any error or make apologies, and then cited legalities when I pushed for an apology and reimbursement for the value of the lost package. Given their refusal to deal with my complaint at all, I am boycotting UPS. I figure with using other shippers for my online purchases and sales, as well as overseas shipping, I will have cost UPS enough lost business within a year to cost them at least as much as it would have to apologized and dealt with the damages. But that's not enough: They need to know what I am doing, and maybe I can encourage enough others to make them rethink their approach to customer service. I just wanted an apology. I got legal mumbo jumbo. Hence this web page to inform people why I am boycotting them.

By way of contrast, I should add, I also recently had trouble with United Airlines. My wife and I travelled to Hawaii. On the voyage from San Francisco to Kona, a six-hour dinnertime flight that advertised that a meal was part of the flight service, exactly six dinners were packed for a plane with 158 passengers. We were not among the lucky six. I wrote United, they apologized promptly and gave us a coupon for $100 future service, good for one year. That's how customer service is supposed to work: you make a complaint and the business tries to resolve in a way that makes the customer happy and encourages the customer to use their service again. United will more than make up that $100 in "lost" service and I'll stick to flying with them when they are a reasonable choice. UPS could well learn from their example.

The story in full

I was going to travel to Russia in late October of 2007 to visit my in-laws. As I have done several times before, I sent my passport to the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Washington D.C. along with all the applications materials via express mail, with a returning express mail envelope addressed to me. In the past I have always used FedEx: they had a location across the street from my work. However some time in the past year, the location closed. So I used the convenient UPS store near my home instead. They even printed the label for the envelope for my returning package for me. Remember that point, because it will be important. It had my address on it, as my receipts show. I checked. These packages, with the envelope to mail it all back to me, went in the mail and arrived at the embassy quite promptly.

Alas, the trouble began a week later when the embassy sent my visa back to me (UPS tracking number J1875541673). The embassy recorded that the address was my home address, and handed it to UPS on October 18. A few hours later, the package was scanned arriving in Landover, Maryland and thence later the same night to Baltimore... and thence it disappeared. It should have arrived at my home on Friday, but I waited for Monday (as there is no weekend delivery to residential addresses). So it was Monday afternoon and no package before I realized something might be amiss and typed the tracking number into the computer system online to see where my visa and passport was... and discovered it had last been seen several days before. That report went in to UPS at 4:30 pm on October 22. Meaning to convey the urgency of the package, I pointed out that it had a passport with visa in it for overseas travel in the near future. Big mistake: if they didn't know what was in the package, they could not have been so creative as they would soon prove to be.

Within hours, the missing package was located in Laurel, Maryland (the logical sorting centre for my home address) and sent on its way. Happily expecting the package the next day, I was unconcerned... until my wife informed me the passport has not arrived at the house during the day. At 4 pm on October 23, I plugged in the tracing number J1875541673 to find out what had happened now... and discovered it HAD been delivered. Just not to me. Someone named "Harrison" had signed for it at an address on C St. in Northwest Washington D.C. A little research online (UPS provided only a street address and that someone had signed for the package) showed that it was the mailroom for the U.S. State Department.

WTF? That was not the address on the envelope when it left my hands! I called UPS to report the package mis-delivered. They said the driver was already back from his rounds, so they would not send him back out to retrieve the package, but would do so the next day. In the meantime I called the Russian Embassy visa division and confirmed that the address on the envelope when it left their hands was still my home address. Somehow while my package was misplaced, it got a new address label (or most likely, a sorting machine stripped the address label, which is how the package got lost. Then when I called to report it missing, instead of sending it to the address I gave when I reported it missing, they recorded that the package contained a lost passport and they put the lost passport office address on the envelope.)

Feeling a tad annoyed, but at least certain I knew where my package was and that it would be retrieved, or failing that, that I could go into the city and get it myself (not feeling very trusting of UPS after they had now lost and then mis-delivered the package), I called the next morning, to be informed that the driver, in fact, had no such instructions to retrieve my package and there no record with UPS whatsoever of my call the previous afternoon to report the mis-delivery (and also a statement of surprise that they had not sent the driver out immediately to retrieve the mis-delivered package the previous day).

A few more calls over the next few hours ascertained that the driver claimed that the mailroom claimed they had not received a mis-delivered package. That is to say, the driver said that the mailroom staff said that there was no package with the wrong address. I was able to neither confirm nor dispel the driver's version, so suggest that UPS applied a new address to the package. UPS was unconcerned that the address on the envelope was not the address it had had when it was given to them in the first place, nor that it did not match the address I gave them for the delivery when I reported the package missing. They have remained steadfast in their claim that they did absolutely nothing wrong and even if they did, the customer service agreement limits liability to the replacement cost of the package and absolutely no responsibility for any incidental costs caused by mis-delivery or lost packages. And they even found a way to wiggle out of that too.

As far as UPS was concerned, their business was done: the letter was delivered and the fact the address had nothing to do with its intended destination was really not their problem. And no, they were not interested in all in any proof I had that it was NOT the address on the envelope when this all started.

This also meant that while the person on the ‘phone with me might be personally sympathetic, UPS would not offer any assistance in retrieving the package, calling the mail room, getting things straightened out and certainly would not provide a letter of apology from them. When I then tried to file a claim, they denied ever hearing of the issue and creatively considered it more than fifteen days old and hence beyond their having any obligation EVEN THOUGH I HAD BEEN IN NEAR CONSTANT CONTACT ABOUT THE PROBLEM WITHIN DAYS OF THE PACKAGE BEING INITIALLY LOST AND REPEATEDLY FILING COMPLAINTS AND REQUESTS FOR REDRESS.

A couple of days of calling through the State Department mail room and their passport services offices never did locate the missing package. With my travel date looming, I had to replace the passport and get a new visa. Since UPS refused to provide a letter of apology, the Russian Embassy could not waive the application fee. Both the State Department passport services office and the Russian Embassy were kind, helpful, and worked very rapidly to replace my missing papers. I had to pay the standard passport and visa application fees, but in both instances, they waived all the expatiated service fees. I had a new passport in an hour, and a new visa in it within the same day. Wow!

The saga, alas, did not end there. When I called UPS to request reimbursement for the delivery fee (since it was not delivered), to complain that their unwillingness to provide a letter of apology cost me $100 in a new application fee that would have been waived if they had provided the letter, and that I got whacked with a $97 new passport application fee not to mention all the angst of dealing with all this right before travelling and having to take most of a day from work to deal with all this.... Well, their response was, and I quote


Unfortunately, a Guaranteed Service Refund must be requested within 15 calendar days from the scheduled delivery date. Since 15 calendar days have elapsed, I am unable to process a refund.


Per the UPS Terms and Conditions of Service, UPS is not liable for any incidental or consequential damages resulting from delayed delivery or attempted delivery. Additional information regarding our service guarantee can be downloaded at the following link


http://www.ups.com/content/us/en/service.html?WT.svl=Footer


Again, I apologize for any problems this late delivery may have caused.


Please contact us if you need any additional assistance.


[name removed for this blog]


UPS Customer Service

I did indeed contact them again to point out that they mangled the delivery, they caused the problem, and while their policies might give them legal reasons to protect them from liability, it was hardly good customer service. No response. And by now, also no surprise.

Here’s what I want UPS to do

• write a letter of apology to me


• write a letter of thanks to the State Department passport services and mailroom offices. Those guys worked pretty hard over a couple of days with frantic calls from me trying to find the passport, and waived all the expatiated processing fees they could have legitimately socked me with. People paying quite a lot of fast processing did not get the speed of service I did.


• write a similar letter of thanks to the Visa division of the Embassy of the Russian Federation.


• some kind of compensation for the ~$200 worth of expenses I incurred because of their incompetence.

If UPS can do at least some of the above, I'll take down this posting and consider the matter resolved. Let's just say I am not holding my breath, based on my experience with them so far, however.

So what to do? There are a lot of options. Shrug it off, accept that paying for two visas and a new passport was just part of the cost of traveling? Certainly that's what UPS seems to want and assumes I do. At some level, I pretty much figure the $200 in fees and lost work time is just lost and I have to write it off.

Complain again to customer service? That doesn't seem to be working. Einstein (or someone else) said that stupidity is trying something that doesn’t work, and then keep trying it expecting a different result.

File a complaint with the Better Business Bureau? I'll be doing that, but I'm not expecting much of it. I'd be pleased to be wrong, however.

File the complaint with something a bit more brutal like Rip Off Report? That might be emotionally satisfying, but I'm not sure it would have much useful in the way of results. The site is terribly disorganized. More important, it is pretty indiscriminate in its collection, which rather undermines its authority (not withstanding that when you Google many companies' names, one of the highest rated Google links will be the Rip Off Report page on them). My genuine complaint is going to be next to a patently false rant about the sexual proclivities of the CEO. What's more, there are pretty serious and reasonably supported allegations that the site operator is running something akin to extortion: for a fee (which is pretty hefty), he'll add an editorial comment to the effect that the information is considered false. A good many of the ranting complaints may originate with himself, and then he asks for a fee to editorialize it (which, if true, certainly seems like extortion). Finally, if the matter were ever to be resolved, the site never takes down material: the complaint would be permanent and I want it to be resolved, not forever outstanding.

So here’s my deal: this page is up on my blog until UPS makes some effort to resolve my complaint. I realize this is not exactly a high traffic web log, but we work with what we have. I am boycotting UPS in the meantime, and pointing anyone and everyone to this blog to explain why. All my online purchases will use another shipper, all my overseas shipments (and with family in Russia, that's no small matter!) will not use UPS, and all my online sales will be shipped with another company and I will prominently display links to this blog page in my online sales pages to explain why... until such a time as the matter is resolved or the internet is replaced with something even better and stranger and all the links die of excessive old age.

I strongly encourage others to consider alternatives to UPS. They deliver things just fine if nothing goes wrong, but God help you if something does go wrong. UPS certainly won’t help and they will deny culability for everything.

And that’s saying nothing about fighting with their automated answering computer to get customer service, dealing with calls getting dropped as they were forwarded, or getting disconnected when put on hold, all of which happened several times in the midst of this adventure. But that seems to just be a standard part of business these days.

Autum Leaves and Pooh Sticks

Note to regular readers: Some of you are aware I have been working on a new log entry tenatively titled “Proud to be American” (which is ironic, since I’m not). The work continues, but is not yet done...

As I write today, it is fall in Maryland. The poorly pruned cherry tree in front is naked of its usual cheery leaves. The two stately oaks on the back are likewise shorn of most of their leaf cover and thus the heavy damage from cicadas earlier this year is no longer visible. The ugly scarred and partly rotten maple on the side of the house has shed a lesser fraction of its leaf load, the last green and yellow leaves still hanging on. If all goes to plan, this will be that tree’s last fall. Its heartwood is rotting from a failed attempt by the previous owners to cut it down, and from a peculiar pruning job. The tree has survived their attentions, but one of these days, a storm is going to catch it the wrong way and it will come falling down. Probably on my house. So as much as I may miss it, it will have to go. Besides, it is a superhighway to the roof for the squirrels.

But for now, it holds on to last leaves of the summer and a stiff brisk breeze now and again knocks the leaves free to float to the ground and erase all signs that I just mowed the lawn and raked the leaves. The compost bins are full to overflowing and yet the leaves still keep coming. The neighbor’s front yard has a huge pin oak tree probably eighty years old to judge from its girth, and that will take over the shading of my home this coming summer. I remain thankful that the builders in this neighborhood, in the late 60s, did not suffer the modern compulsion to cut down every last tree before starting construction. But my pride in the stately trees does not extend to endangering my house nor tolerating the squirrels of destruction on the roof, especially since my neighbor shares a roof with me and is none to happy to have squirrels scrambling over his head in the early morning as they are wont to do.

Autumn brings it happy cycle around. The garden is now retired and the tomato plants no longer producing tomatoes in vast and endless supply as they had been doing through the late summer, burying me in an avalance of tomatoes and parsley and mint and oregano. The basil I was able to keep up with, but the rest... well, I brought a lot of tomatoes to work and my freezer is full of them to boot. I tried a couple of years ago to thin the crop and toss the green fruit in the compost bins, but the next year everywhere I put down the compost, I got volunteer tomoatoes. It looked especially strange when put in the compost as fill dirt where the old shed foundation had been, then seeded the new patch with grass... and got a rich bed of tomato plants trying to outgrow the grass. But for their habit of dying in the first serious frost, the grass might never have won.

As I bring plants into pots and inside for the winter, the squirrels are madly putting acorns in strange places, not the least of all places the pots, so I often come home to find the pepper plants transplanted to pots tipped over where the blasted creatures have dug them up seeking places for their nuts. I’ve finally learned that the shock of being brough inside with less light and more warmth right after transplanting is probably easier on the peppers than being ripped apart by squirrels. Of course in the spring, the squirrels will rip them apart all over again seeking those same nuts. I recall my first year in the house being amazed at all the volunteer oak trees that started sprouting in one of the larger pots. The squirrels killed them off in two days once the pot was moved outside.

It is a magical time for my two cats, especially for Carmel. Carmel, despite being a disgustingly cute looking cat with chocolate siamese colouration and bright blue eyes, is a bit psychotic. I think he was rescued from the street a little too late and some of that essential feralness had already established itself, but maybe the poor beast is just a bit daft. He is terrified of people and desperate for attention at the same time. The only way to pet him is for him to think you are not looking at him and he will allow you (or even demand you) to pet him as he wanders by. There are odd exceptions: I can pet him and look at him at the same time if I am seated on my bed getting dressed in the morning, sitting on the toilet seat, or perhaps sitting down having a ‘phone conversation. An open window is like catnip to him, and opening a window will make him run from some place in the house to jump in the open space, a trick he has not unlearned no matter how many times it is shortly followed by me putting him in a cat carrier and taking him to the vet.

Carmel will not play with me. His brother Zorro (a non-genetic relationship: Carmel was rescued from the alleys of D.C. and Zorro from a barn in Rhode Island) is thrilled at times with the laser pointer, and Carmel just doesn’t get it. Zorro comes up into my lap and demands love and attention now and again, usually when I working on the computer or reading a book or a paper and in no position to deal with the aggressive wet nose attempts to shove the laptop, paper, or book aside. Carmel does occasionally deign to play with one or another of the cat toys around, but won’t engage in any play with me. All games must be solitary. He is the cat that walks alone, like Rudyard Kipling’s cat.

There is one unusual exception to this and it comes this one time of year. I call it Pooh Sticks, though that game of A.A. Milne fame bears little resemblence to this. Carmel is driven quite batty by the sight of a single leaf falling. And since I have a back deck some ten feet off the ground, which gets a liberal covering of them, I can drop them one by one down onto the ground below and Carmel will chase down each and every one.

Somewhere in that little cat brain, there is something that makes particular leaves special. All leaves are at least cursory chased. Some are more actively hunted as they come down and quite actively stomped on when they land. A few get a nominal chewing. And a couple this afternoon ranked good enough to justify a good cat jump off the ground to intercept them before they hit ground. Curled, flat, big, small, brown, yellow green, maple, white oak, pin oak... I have no idea what it is that makes particular leaves special, but they are taken down and killed mercilessly.

And never mind there is a carpet of leaves so thick on the ground that both cats could completely disappear beneath it with ease. No, it must be that exactly, only that leaf, and the moment it is dispatched, Carmel is looking back up longingly for the next to be let loose from my hands. He has boundless enthusiasm for this game and is yet to give up prior to my patience being exhausted or the leaves on the deck all being gone. It is rare for it to be the latter.

The homeowner ritual of raking the lawn of its leaves is always a peculiar one to me. I have in the past raked the yard clean and of course come out the next day to find little sign that I’ve done the work as a whole new batch has recarpeted the lawn. It usually takes three or four attempts to get them all done, and the leaf piles exceed the compost bin capacity by quite a bit to boot, so the piles will tend to migrate across the lawn again until the next good soaking rain wets them down in place enough to stay. But I seem to be the luddite of the street, with many opting to blow the leaves with forced air gadgets. One neighbor actually has an odd vacuum cleaner device to pick them up out of his gravel and backyard pool decking. Those in the front he feeds to a shredded and thence onto a tarp to pull them away into the BGE property behind the houses where the power lines come through. BGE, to the best of my knowledge, has never expressed any opinion one way or the other about the annual compost donations.

Some neighbors go quite mad with their blowers. I cannot leave windows open at night for the roar of the gas and electric blowers each evening as some suburbanite decides that a one day coating of leaves on his lawn and driveway is an insult to his manhood, and for another half hour each night, the leaves get pushed around by forced air onto the street or into a pile from which they will wander at will in the wind.

Or perhaps, once it gets dark, to be reformed on their lawn to spell out “Blow me” in large leafy letters. But I, of course, would know nothing about that.

For now, though, I content myself with the small joys of Pooh Sticks and knowing that, at least just for this one day, I have been accepted by the most discriminating of cats.

Chip Flick - My contribution to the English language

There are a wide variety of terms used to group and classify movies. There’s “Sci-Fi” for science fiction, action-adventure, romance, comedies, romantic comedies, documentaries, fantasy, westerns, and the odd running series that makes a genre of their own (James Bond, Star Wars, etc.). Some are quite good (Carl Sagan’s Contact, High Noon), some bad (Glitter), and some so wretched awful they prove space, time, and good taste are all circular by turning into movies you cannot miss (Plan Nine from Outer Space). And there are the cult classics for which there is no explanation (Rocky Horror Picture Show, Buckaroo Banzai, and so on).

Each appeals to different people and different audiences, and film critics who fail to understand this, or somehow think this is irrelevant, just end up looking clueless. I particuarly loved it when a recent Washington Post reviewer slammed a James Bond movie for being vacuous. Hello? Intellectual stimulation and 007 don’t have much common ground. Check out your sense at the theatre door: no one ever pretended James Bond was cutting edge film.

Because of these audience tendancies, some films get subgrouped by the audience they appeal to rather than the film type itself. “Guy flicks” are aimed at teenaged boys and men wishing to stay in touch with their innner teenaged boy: lots of action and adventure, fast moving plot (fast enough, perhaps, for you to not notice that there is not much in the way of plot), and probably a few very hot women here and there for eye candy dressed in just enough clothing to avoid the dreaded M rating (for immature audiences only). “Chick flicks” are aimed at women wishing to send aside reality for Prince Charming fantasies in which Guy Meets Girls, some non-sensectial thing seperates them, then because the Universe has fated them to be together, Love Wins The Day, and after years of seperation (or about 90 minutes of wasted celluiod), are magically reunited (often dumping at the last minute whomever they were just about to marry). The common element to both is that they are geared to their audience rather than the film itself, so all sorts of logical contradictions and foolishness are completely tolerable. Occasionally you get a red herring crossover that tries to be both (Jerry Maguire, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), but they are rare. And often make more sense than prototypical guy flicks like Shanghai Noon or chick flicks like Serendipity, Fifty First Dates, and How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days.

However, some years ago, I coined a phrase for a then-emerging new genre, which I coined the “Chip Flick”: a movie that attempts to compensate for its shortcomings in acting skill, plot logic, pacing, and so by the excessive use of computer animation in an attempt to distract the viewer with stunning visuals to the fact that, stripped of such visuals, there ain’t much there at all. In this day and age of copyright, patent law suits, and all, I just wish to be clear on the record: I am the responsible party for creating this term, and the Oxford English Dictionary should cite me me me me as the source for this term since I first used it roughly five years ago.

Keep in mind that at the time I made fun of this approach, I was actually working in a computer generated animation position (albeit not one in the commercial film industry), and this is not a blanket condemnation of CG animation at all. Some films make careful and thoughtful use of CG effects, or have such strong sustaining plots to which these elements, and my coworkers, are the sort of people who will pause Monsters Inc. to replay scenes where the monster Sully’s fur gets blown around in the wind because it is such a visually stunning piece of graphics animation which is both eye candy to animators and makes perfect sense in the plot, which is well sustained and logical and would work perfect well if they just used little cardboard cutouts instead (and I would like add a note of thanks to the makers of South Park for lowering the standards of CG animation low enough that anyone can play in the field). It’s not the animation per sey that I am objecting to, it is that it is being used to compensate for the absence of all the critical elements of good story telling through film.

Where I get in really hot water, alas, is that my prototype for this is a movie with terrible acting, a series of gaping idiotic and obvious holes in its fundamental premise that are laughable... and some of the most stunning and compelling computer generated special effects seen to date. In fact several new techniques and innovatative approaches to animation were created in the making of this film that they have spread far and wide into advertising, or in frequent homage references in films since.

I speak, of course, of The Matrix. I was stunned. I thought it a remarkably smooth and well polished film, but fundamentally pretty stupid. While my colleagues were raving about the effects, or talking about the deep philosophical questions of how we know the reality we see is real, or whether there was a second or third layer to the matrix, and so on, I’m sitting there going “Humans as batteries? Just how stupid are you?” Why do the digital avatars have the capabilities and limitations they have: there is no reason for them at all. It makes no sense. But, as I said, I seem to be in the minority indeed on this. Perhaps there is something to this: the effects in this case were so stunning that the forebrain activity is totally surpressed, like horny men staring at a Playboy centerfold.

So I have a new prototype that won’t get me lynched. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Stunning all digital computer generated animation with an almost realistic visual feel... and no plot. At least no one is going to harange me for making fun of a film based on a video game.

Adventure Sprint Triathalon

As some fraction of you fair readers may be aware, I just “competed” in an adventure sprint triathalon this past Sunday (October 3rd, 2004) in Richmond. “Compete” is in quote marks there because winning, or even coming close to winning, was not among our goals. Finishing is good enough for me: we were there to have fun. My own personal goal was to see if we could finish in under four hours: The event looks “easier” than a marathon and I’m sure from past experience I can pull off an under four hours (based on my recent experience of running the Montgomery County Marathon in the Parks in 4:42? Never mind the logic: I did Iowa City in 3:16:57 once. But that was twenty years and fifty pounds ago.). But that four hour figure is based on pretty much nothing and I’ll be perfectly pleased to just finish.

Turns out that will be a good thing.

The theory behind the Adventure Sprint Triathalon is that part of the adventure is not quite knowing what is going to happen. It is not just a course, but an obstacle course, and done as a team of three together. The web site on the race is very vague: 5-7 miles of running, 10-15 miles of mountain biking, and 1-3 miles of kayaking, with about ten (I counted four: they must have mean base 3 or something) special events. The vagueness is deliberate: you do not know exactly what you are getting into until the evening before the race when they announce at least some parts of it.

On the afternoon before the race, there are a series of clinics on the events. Some are useless: lots of interesting stuff about ways to be really competive in the mountain biking section, for example, but all information you would have to have had several months ago to implement and practice. The one useful thing from this particular clinic is they talk about strategies for how to work with a challenge of three riders but only two bikes, one of the challenges they might throw at us. The elite team doing this clinic explains that they all got identical fashion clip pedals, so they have the same gear and they “leapfrog”, changing up who is running and who is riding so no one person gets exhausted. We will not end up having this challenge, but it proves to be potentially useful information.

Another interesting clinic that they give twice is about the kayaking, and they also have practice kayaking sessions which Evonne and I take advantage of. The kayaks are inflatable canoe shaped things with seating for one or two (in theory) and Evonne and I practice two person techniques. Thinking I have it down after the practice, I nominate myself to be the rear paddler in the boat for two with Evonne and have teammate Grant take another kayak on his own, under the theory that the practice and my arm strength will be best for the task (not entirely false assumption, but it will turn out that Grant is actually the more experienced kayaker and it will show). The James River is currently in heavy flood from recent rains (including the visit of Hurricane Ivan two weeks before that put much of the riverfront in Richmond under water), and the kayaking portion of the event is just above the fall line, so a bad false move and a poor recovery and you are not only out of the race, but about to go down the rapids. I’d estimate them at Class II or III, but these are not glorious kayaks and if you shoot the rapids, it is going to be because you are inexperienced and just the sort of person whom should not be trying this.

I should add that I have never met Grant before the afternoon before the race. He is there with his wife, Jill, who is also running the event with two of her college friends, Margs and Liz, in the all-female team The Sirens. Our team is Amish Army. Don’t ask, I cannot explain it either. But team names are interesting: there were also such teams as Three Older Women With Too Much Spandex and Three $80 K-mart Bikes. Evonne's friend Sean is also here (and the pictures you see in this weblog are all courtesy of Sean, by the way) and Liz’s friend Jesse (What, another one?) who also is getting the camera and cheerleading duties.

After the clinics, we all gather for the orientation. And this is where the vagueness of the website starts to make sense: Most of the race is supposed to be a surprise, and now is the moment they will reveal it to us. First, they go through the basic orientation stuff. When the transition area (where you can store bikes and gear) opens in the morning, some of the basic rules we already know (you cannot get any help of any kind from anyone outside the race, so this includes having your own water, food, bike tools, etc.), some basic rules we do not know (bikes have to be walked on Browns Island getting in and out and dismount and mount areas for the island, and the stage across the major bridge over the James will be strictly enforced, “scootering” is not allowed), and then onto the moment of truth. First event, 6.5 miles of running. Then suddenly the organizer asks if there is anyone here who does not know how to swim. And promises that whether or not it is raining and no matter how slowly you chose to run tomorrow, you are going to get wet.

We are swimming? In the James River? In flood? Oh dear me...

Okay, next is “7++ miles” of mountain biking. ++ miles? Does this mean the ride will be highly technical stuff? Or just that someone has spent way too much time doing Object Oriented Programming? But at least it is way shorter than the advertised 10-15 miles. Mountain biking is the part that has me the most concerned since I have the least practice and experience and my training experiences have been an interesting mix of dismounting to walk and terrifying myself by trying to ride through places I probably should have gotten off and walked. Then about 0.75 miles of kayaking. Got it. Then “another 7++ miles” of biking. Uhh, it had not occured to me that you might not do all your distance in one go. This is going to be interesting... They also tell us nothing about the special events and promise us only that the directions for those events, which we will have to carry in a carry case with us through the race, will be given to us just before we start tomorrow morning.

This orientation will turn out to have a couple of lies, or at least be misleading. In fact there will more than one piece of misleading information given to us, but we will get to that as it comes.

Orientation also builds a sense I was getting through the afternoon already. Now I am a reasonably fit person: I can get up one day and hike 15 miles with a 40 pound backpack and, blisters not withstanding, get up and do it again the next day. I’ve trained for this event, admittedly not necessarily with incredible diligence, but I have no fears about completing the course in the maximum allowable time of six hours. But looking around the tent where we are all gathered (about 210 teams of three people each), I notice that these people look incredibly fit. I’m the lumpy looking one: this is not a place for someone with body image issues to be! Fortunately the kayak trail also gave me good reason to not be too intimidated by appearances as Evonne and I were able to outpaddle almost the entire field of try-out folks. There was two women who blazed across and a few others who showed skills comparable to us, but lots of people struggling just to make the kayak go forward. I think they are gym strong rather than field strong: the sort who can bench press four times as much as me, but couldn’t carry a backpack for a whole day of hiking.

After the orientation, we regroup and discuss having dinner together, but since Liz, Margs, and Jesse are staying with Grant and Jill at their home an hour away in Hampton Roads, they are heading straight out as they will have to leave the house around 5:30 AM to get to the opening of the staging area in the morning. So they head home and Sean, Evonne, and I wander through the restaurant district, without seeing anything that screamed that we just had to go there. At least not tonight: there's a number of interesting looking places with live music and Irish Pub, but when you are in the middle of working very hard to stay hydrated, a beer is a really bad idea. Near the end of our walk, we come on the Rivah Cafe and get waylaid by the greeter who insists we want to eat there and since it looks both reasonably priced and as good as anything else we have seen, we accept.

To find we are the only customers. Does everyone else know somethings we don’t?

Dinner proves to be quite good when it comes, and customers do come in. It takes us a little while to realize that it is actually not that late, but with autumn on us, it gets dark earlier each day and we had not realized it was only around 6 PM when we found the place. The wine list is tempting, but we stick to water and ice tea with our dinner.

And then it is off to our respective hotels (Evonne and Sean got a cut rate for runners at a hotel right near the waterfront and the race, while the special was gone and I found a low rate on the edge of town near the freeway through an online service) and call it a night. Before I turn in for the night, I set the alarm and spend some time with a map of Maryland fantasizing about possible canoe trips with my new canoe. But in good time, I turn in for the night.

The next morning, I get up, get a very quick breakfast, set up my stuff for the event, pack, leave, and park in the lot near Browns Island before the attendent is ready for us all, so I end up getting free parking. Whoa ho! Little thrills for little minds. Or is it that great minds are easily amused?

It turns out for all the fuss about getting to the transition area early to get the best spot, there is nothing to fight over: it is all more or less assigned. Our team number is is 12, presumed on the basis of Amish Army being up near the front of the alphabetically ordered list, since The Sirens probably entered and paid their registration around the same time as us, but are down around team 152 or thereabouts. The announcer gives us a slightly rude surprise: we must wear our helmets for all the events all day. Grrr.... I was really wanting to wear the cap for the run where it would soak up the sweat. The helmet is going to be a soupy mess by the end of the day.


Amish Army before the race. Notice the lack of mud.

They assemble us at the start line and we find the first of the lies from last night. No, we are not going to get our instructions a few minutes before the race as promised, but they will be issued at the first special event. This is so we cannot read them and plan ahead. Which turns out to be a good thing, but again, I will get to that. The race is also going to be started exactly the wrong way, with the co-ed teams like ours leaving right at 8 AM, the all female teams five minutes later, the all male and elite teams another five minutes later. In other words, all the fast people are going to spend the first hour or so smashing their way through the rest of us, trail ettiquette be damned. There is also no sorting out before the start line based on estimates of start times.

But off we go, and along the river and across the very long pedistrian suspension bridge under the freeway to Belle Island on the far side, and up into the woods. The trail is narrow and there is no room to pass, so we are always stuck at the pace of the slowest person around, which is a problem for me since I tend to go downhill slowly and uphill rapidly, the exact opposite of everyone else, which makes going up very hard on me since I cannot use my momentum. But we seem to set a reasonable pace over the hill on the island, noticing that the bike path is marked out as staying on the roadway around instead of the narrow trail we are on. That will make life that much easier later. We rejoin the bike path on the far side, cross a bridge to the shore proper, and then start wandering in the woods besides the railroad tracks, going through some very rocky and muddy spots that are going to be hell on the bike later, then ford a stream and have to run down inside the culvert. Ah, is this what the helmet is for? The culvert opening is maybe all of five feet high, so we have to run scrunched over. But on the far side, it is up into the woods and up the bank we go. It seems to be going surprisingly fast and indeed Grant confirms we are running 8-8.5 minute miles, which is a bit faster than we thought we would with Evonne’s ankle issues. The path winds us up the banks and up back onto the roads and across the James River again on the bridge. But there’s an interesting twist. Back on the Browns Island side, there is a huge backup at an unexpected obstacle. The all-male teams are starting to catch up with here and get a bit hyper-aggressive and try to cut in line, but just as aggressively get shooed back. The problem is that everyone needs to stop and go down a seven or eight feet long ladder one at a time, then turn around and run over a metal grate catwalk clearly intended for maintenance use only. So we have a bit of a quiet rest here waiting for our turn to get down and run the catwalk.

It is a slightly odd experience to be running on an open metal grate just a few feet wide with rails on either side... and the raging torrent of the James River in flood maybe all of six feet below us. The direction of the run is upstream, so the water kept getting closer and closer. After a hundred metres or so, the steel grate gave way to a wide round concrete pipe on which we had to run. That was okay, but it was a curved surface with a narrow space for us to be running along. And now the river is right up along the side of the pipe perhaps two feet below the top and there is no railing. Then it is only a foot below. Then lapping at the top. Then swirling over the tops of my running shoes. And while the shore ahead with volunteers and people with lines to throw us should we fall in, are all visible ahead, and things are backing up again here, it is still a bit of a ways to go and the pipe is now no longer visible at all through the murky muddy water. It is a job of pointing yourself straight ahead, taking it a bit on faith that the pipe is where you think it is and planting your feet carefully to not be swept off the side nor mistep. By the time we reach the assistant helping us jump over to the shore, the river is up around my calves and the pressure from it running down is hard enough that a misplanted foot is going to send me over the side. And this is a big pipe with water flowing over and around and under it, so it is at least six feet down in the water here. Eck! The guy behind me is getting anxious to force me to move along faster since there is no way he can pass me, but I have no intention of going too fast to be sure of my footing. The end comes, I catch up with Evonne and Grant who were ahead of me, and the frustrated fellow behind me takes off into the woods. It is a short run up towards the transition area where we encounter our first special event and get handed the special events instructions which we do not read as we are being told what to do by organizers and can see what others are doing.


Concentrating on the directions while teams do the cinderblock walk in the background

We have three cinderblocks and a blindfold and must cross a ten foot wide space touching each other at all times (I think: anyway, we did it holding hands the entire time) by standing only on the cinderblocks. Grant goes first, Evonne dons the blindfold and goes next, then I follow, picking up and passing the cinderblock to Grant to put further across and we sidestep all the way across at a reasonable but unrushed pace.

We were lucky: the instructions for the event were misprinted and said you had to do the crossing with two blocks, not three, and when The Sirens arrive a few minutes later, they would lose a few minutes reading the instructions, spelling and content errors and all, watching other people go across on three, and trying to work out what they were supposed to do. As it will turn out, we never need the instructions as we are told what to do at each stage, so the requirement that we have a map carrying case and bring the instructions with us will be a bit superfluous.

From there, we run into the transistion area, get water and a quick bite (I’m doing simple fruit cereal bars and water, but others have Balance Bars and fancy sport food and drink. I’ve found, even under the gruelling demands of a several hour long event like this, those things to helpful or necessary, and most taste pretty awful.). We’ve been on the course for not quite an hour now as we get our bikes and run with them down Browns Island, across the bridge, and into mounting area to pedal like mad to the suspension bridge again to get across to Belle Island and the trails over there. As we are going across, we see the first of the elite teams on their way back already. Well, we already knew we were not in their class.

Belle Island is a nice ride on the bike: a pretty wide open fire access road kind of track with space for me to open up on the bike without running anyone down and, more important, where I am not getting run down by some of the more gungho energetic people behind me. Then it is across the bridge and onto the narrow paths we were running on an hour or so ago. And this is where things get a bit dicey: the testerone poisoned hyper aggressive men (draw whatever conclusions you wish from this, but it was always all male teams smashing people aside with sharp elbows) got a bit testy about passing here. On one section, we are riding on a concrete pipe (same style as the one we were running on just after the ladder), so there is no passing space, then there a concrete wall to manuveur around and no space on either side, but lots of space just beyond it. One fellow forces me into the wall rather than wait the two seconds it would take to allow me to get past the barrier and out of his way. Trail ettiquette be damned.

We have another stream fording and down into a different section of the culvert pipe where it is high enough to stand up and ride on the bike, which I do try, only to have a steep climb on the other side that requires dismounting just a few feet further on, another stream and culvert to go through, and now for the next several miles, we have a fairly challenging piece of trail. It’s a lot of rocky narrow trail with climbs and drops that would be at the limit of what I could do, but much of it I probably could do on my own, but sharing the trail with 600 other people, it is impossible to get the momentum to go up the steep parts and get out of the way gracefully for the more energetic people trying to force their way faster down the trail. Tempers get a bit frayed here, both from the course being hard and the stop and go cycle that keeps anyone from really building any momentum. At one point, Grant in the lead completely wipes out when his tyres hit a downed limb, he gets out of the way, I manage to get across slowly higher up without sliding out too bad, but I’m splayed out on the trail and faster than I can get out of the way, another woman comes up behind me and wipes out in exactly the same spot and way as Grant and chews me out for not being out of the way as she gets back up. I stay as much out of the way as I can and as soon as Evonne catches up here, and there is a break in the backlog, Grant and I force the limb off the course so it doesn't cause any more accidents.

Another mile or so on, after a few more interesting obstacles such as having to ride the bike on the top of a concrete wall over a stream with a five to eight foot drop on either side (but wide enough that Evonne, which she reaches it, has space to dismount and run beside her bike rather than risk a tumble), we have a very steep set of stairs to get down, which is where Team Balance Bar (the lead team) blazes past us: they are on their second loop around on the mountain biking already. Team Nike ACG and Team Red Bull will also make it past us here, more or less, within just minutes of each other. But the really technical riding past this stair step thing is much less prevalent and for the most part, we are able to actually ride on the trail from here to the bridge over the tracks, and from there the course is almost all fire track kind of surface the rest of the way back to the suspension bridge (though there is one tricky spot where we have a foot wide spot right next to a chain link fence and a steep dropoff with brush to go through, but we manage to ride through there without incident).

Near the suspension bridge back across the James River, my bike suddenly starts to ride very strangely. I push on, but I cannot keep up and Evonne and Grant pull a fair bit ahead of me here. It’s not ‘til I get to the bridge and dismount as required that I realize that not only do I have a flat tyre, but there is, in fact, a good four inch long nail sticking out of the back tyre. No thumb tacks here! I push across the bridge, chuck the nail in a rubbish bin right at the remount spot across the bridge and gingerly ride back to Browns Island to catch up to the transition area, point out the nail issue, get more water, another fruit bar, decide to see if the back wheel will magically heal itself while we are gone, and we head for the kayak part of the event.


Starting the leapfrog through the mud

But first we have to go to a giant mudpit where the instructions say to leapfrog across. Grant starts and he lands quite deliberately full body lying down in the mud. Quite without thinking, I follow suit. And after leaping over his arms, I land and hit my knees hard on some rocks underneath the mud. Naturally hardest on the left knee which is already giving me a little grief about all the demands of the day: it’s a long standing annoying, but not problematic, injury from my years of field hockey in high school. I’m a little more careful of my knees, and less careful about leap frogging to form (whatever that is: I thought leapfrogging was more of on-hands-and-feet hunched over thing than lying on the ground... or in very soft slurpey mud. Grant some time after the event tells me that we needed to lie down in the mud. Well, he was the one reading the instructions. Given the errors in the instructions already uncovered, I’m a little dubious that this is what was intended.).


Caked in mud!

Wow, what a mess! Coming out of the mud pit, hobbling a bit from my knee, I figure I have added about fifteen pounds to myself with this mud. We all try to brush off what we can as we run down to get the inflatable kayaks. Where it is as we heard earlier: three life vests and three people, but two kayaks and two paddles. Grant and I settled ahead of time that I’ll carry Evonne as a passenger and he’ll go on the single kayak. Of course it turns out they are all single kayaks, but we get into the river and head off.

Part of the reason I thought I should carry Evonne was I figured I would be the strongest paddler amongst us. I’ve got good arm strength and endurance from smashing up and removing the rubble from a concrete sidewalk and old shed foundation this past summer, and I’ve been out on the water a few times and seem to have a better sense of steering and such than most in the past. Grant did not get a chance to practice yesterday whereas Evonne and I did and I am confident of my sense of the kayak. That confidence is not misplaced: even with the passenger up front, I make it across the James main stream in reasonable time and pace, even with a few quick breaks to try to splash water on my hands to get the mud off so I am not rubbing it into my hands as I paddle. But Grant is clearly far more in his element than I and gets all the way across and around the far buoy and to the pulloff point on Belle Island well ahead of us. We get there, and taking a cue from others, waste a bit of time splashing around in the shallow waters there trying to get the bulk of the mud from the pit off us. I get enough off my knee to see that it is not a horrible problem, but it is bothering me a little and certainly has some scrapes and might be swelling a little. Nothing that is going to stop me. We pick up the two kayaks and carry them to the next put-in point where Evonne leaves us to run across on the suspension bridge and Grant and I take off on our own, one kayak each, and power back across the James.

Some teams have opted to tie the kayaks together and have two paddling together, but I recall from the practice how tricky this is and I don’t see any team at this point doing it all that well. Of course we are well into the race by now and the competitive teams are well ahead of us by this point, so we are surrounded by other teams of comparable ability to ourselves, which is to stay they are not stellar, so maybe this is a good strategy with more skilled folks. All I know is that my seat back is not working for me at all and I am holding up all my weight with my back muscles as I paddle and while this is getting me across the river and upstream of the buoy as required, it is hard going and I am going to have a very sore back and an intense desire for a massage when this is all done. Alas, no such luck.


Negotiating the spider web obstacle

Grant easily outperforms me getting across, and Evonne is there to help us get the two kayaks across and take them back onto Browns Island, turn them and vests and paddles in, and step into the next special challenge just before the transition area. It’s a “spider web” where we have to have only two people touching the ground, team members always touching each other, and get across a webbing of ropes a foot or so above the ground without touching them. Grant takes Evonne on his back, and I hold her hand, and we step gingerly across.

I think the judges are bored or inattentive or just don’t care too much by now. I think I just graze one line and Grant thinks his shorts might have touched another, but neither infraction gets us sent back, so off we go and it is time to search for someone with a wrench to get my back wheel off.

Yeah, I got a cheap bike and it doesn’t have quick release. And my patch kit and crescent wrench are in the car. I think. Maybe they are on my dining room table at home. Either way, it does not matter because we are not allowed to accept outside help, so I cannot ask Sean or Jesse to go get it (if they are even there) nor can I run off the course to get them either. But we can get help from other teams. Grant finds someone with a Leatherman style thing with an adjustable wrench head and we try to muscle the bolts free with that, but cannot seem to get the leverage.

Fortunately, there is a fellow from Team Streak (At the time, I thought they said they were The Streakers, but let’s not get all Freudian here). Their team is the only elite team with no corporate sponsor. By day, he works on a farm in Pennsylvania and anyone who can armwrestle a tractor can certainly work the bolts free, which he demonstrates. He introduces himself, but I miss his name (Turns out it is, and I promise I am not making this up, Flash Barchick. Something tells me this is his, err, professional name.). Anyway, we get the wheel off and Grant gets the spare tube he has out... and naturally, it is a different size. Oh dear. Okay, now our strategy is that I am going to run behind Evonne and Grant. The good news is that I have heard that the second loop on the mountain bike is significantly shorter, like maybe four to five miles instead of 7++ (yeap, they misled us again, didn’t they?). Flash, bless his heart, instead offers me to use his bike. Suddenly I’ve gone from having a decent bike with a flat tyre to having a stellar bike with front suspension and everything. Flash is a bit shorter than I, so it is not sized and adjusted to me, but this is not a long ride nor am I going to hold anyone up any more with this. We’ve probably spend a good ten to fifteen minutes on this by now. We fuel up again, get water, and get back out onto the course.


Heading out for our second biking loop, looking like poster children for a Tide commercial

Just as we are getting onto the suspension bridge, we meet Liz running back across from the kayaking component.

As I said, it is more of the same as before, though instead of going through the second culvert and up the hill and into the technical climbing, we are now doing a bit of trail riding that is less challenging, down the stairway from hell, across the railroad tracks, and back. But while we are riding at a reasonable enough pace, none of us is even remotely trying to race fast at this point: we are ready to just keep together at a comfortable pace that does not exhaust us. Just as we are getting near to the suspension bridge back, we have to go back into that narrow space along the fence again which we rode without trouble last time, but Evonne is weak enough from several hours in a row of serious exertion that her handle on her steering is not as firm this time and she manages to take a pretty nasty spill here into the brush and is a bit in mild shock from it. She refuses to ride any further on this narrow spot and instead we all dismount and run alongside our bikes... at least for about a few seconds. Evonne is running so fast with her bike Grant and I cannot keep up with her and have to get back on the bikes and ride! The course opens up again shortly after this and it is all open path from here, so Evonne gets back on and we pedal for the suspension bridge, me carefully avoiding the spot where I think I picked up the nail, and back to the transition area, where I thank Flash profusely and he responds by coming with us to the next challenge out of the transition area (No, we are still not done yet!). I nominate Flash for sainthood (But can you see the Pope sanctifying a Flash Barchick? I doubt there’s an Imam around open minded enough to do the trick either. But here I am digressing again.).


Climbing Jacob’s Ladder

The first of the two obstacles between us and the finish line is the hidden secret thing called Jacob’s Ladder. It’s basically a slightly complicated set of monkey bars, save that they are all made of rope. We do not learn this ‘til later (thank goodness!), but Team Nike ACG was coming in a good clear second place for the entire event when one of their team fell and broke her wrist here, just a hundred feet from the finish line, and had to quit the race. Anyway, between the eager volunteers helping us, ourselves helping each other, and Flash’s instructions and help (all of which is allowed to make it across), we get through in good form.


Heading over the wall. The dude minus the shirt is our angel of mercy, Flash Barchick.

Now for the real kicker. We have to get all three of us over a 12 foot high wall. That’s about three and a half metres for your metric folks. We know the strategy and had a plan for this, but Flash disavows us of it right away. He wants to send me up second “since you send the weakest member of the team up second” (Thanks, Flash. Then again, you did just loan me your wonderful bike and help us across the Jacob’s Ladder and I am the only team member limping, so I guess I deserve that.). Evonne climbs up Grant’s shoulders, he stands up which takes her near the top, then a volunteer reaches down to help her get hands over the top and with Flash and I pushing her feet up, she goes over. Now we do the same with me. I am taller than Evonne, but a lot heavier, but manage to make it up anyway. Now I anchor the rope and let it down for Grant to climb, he scrambles up and over, we go down the other side, and run the last fifteen feet to cross the finish line after having been on the course for 5 hours, a minute, and some seconds.


Crossing the finish line!

After some self-congratulations for finishing, and a quick drink or five of water from the station set up there, I head for the first aid station to get the knee cleaned and disinfected, and we stand around for a very short period of time before Liz, Margs, and Jill show up and scramble across the wall to finish about eight minutes behind us (which is actually about two minutes faster than us since they started ten minutes later). They must have pedaled hard and fast to lessen the gap during that last mountain biking lap.


Amish Army after the race. We look happier than when we started, don’t we?

And that is the full report on the triathalon. We did go to a nice microbrewery afterwards for lunch, and since we were not worried about being hydrated for more running, we could finally actually enjoy a nice pleasant pint of the local conconcotion. I am sure the city will be wondering about the mad flush of mud down the restaurant’s drain as we washed up a bit there after having changed into more decent and less muddy gear, but still had mud past the elbows when we arrived. I think they were used it by the time of our arrival, though. I counted a lot of cars with bike racks in the parking lot, including the overall winners, Team Balance Bar, a couple of tables over.

After a pleasant lunch together, it was time to head off our seperate ways for home, which was a good two and a half hours of driving for me with the injured bike in the back. I got home and got three of the four things I most wanted in the world right then: a hot shower, a clean change of clothes, a nice glass of wine, and a really good back massage to loosen the knots from kayaking. Alas, Zorro is not trained in shiatsu techniques, so I had to do without the last.

Jesse

The Flight of The Canoe

Yes, this is a total break with tradition to write about something just after it happens instead of a year or more after the fact... but I had an amusing adventure yesterday.

It starts, actually, some time back. After the misadventures of trying to reach Mallows Bay, I realized that I wanted to get back there and that there did not seem to be any outfitters around within a day’s paddling of the location. Roughly a year ago, I started looking more seriously at canoes and kayaks, seriously enough to have purchase an adaptor for the roof rack to take them, but did not find anything that really motivated me enough to make it happen. A monster plane ticket (It's about $2000 a pop for me to go home to Australia for Christmas, as compared to a “mere” $1500 at other times of the year) also ran sucked the wallet dry and by the time I was no longer reeling for that particular financial insult, the passion for the canoe had dried up and moved to the back of my mind.

Some recent events brought it back to the fore, however. One was helping my friend Meredith move to her new condominium home from the basement apartment she had been renting for two years or so prior. She has a kayak which has been sitting unused in the backyard at the old place, and at least at move-in time, was seriously shy on any place to put it at her yard-less, storage-less new home. I offered to store it at my place temporarily, where it has been sitting darkly taunting me.

It turns out there is some sizing to kayaks and little Meredith and clunky big ole me are not compatible, at least at the level of kayaks. I haven't worked out how to get in the thing even if it is adjustable somehow.

But I did bring it along to a wonderful camping spot on the Cacapon River a month or so ago when my friend Pam had her birthday camping weekend event up near Berkeley Springs in West Virginia. Fantastic spot right on the river, very quiet and peaceful and a great place for a good splash in the water. Of course I don’t fit in the kayak and Pam who is significantly smaller than I (what with lacking spare tyre in the middle and all) was barely able to get in the kayak, while I borrowed her inflatable sit-on-top kayak (Fred, the Float-a-boat). It was wonderful fun and reminded me that this was something I would really enjoy doing, not withstanding that I managed to shatter one of the joints on Fred’s paddle. Opps! Sorry about that, Pam (and I still owe you a new paddle, don’t I?)

So I went back to looking seriously at canoes and kayaks again after that trip. A bit of thought brought me to close in on the idea of a canoe: it has more space inside and is a bit more versatile for overnight camping and such and seems a little more in tune with me. And a canoe was a lot less than a recreational kayak with suitable luggage space, more flexible about having one or two or even three aboard while remaining manageable to paddle and steer on my own. But cheaper is not cheap, and a new canoe was more than I was willing to part with.

E-Bay to the rescue (after determining that there did not seem to be anything second hand in the local classifieds). I found lots of used canoes for sale... in Washington State and Minnesota. Sale requires pickup. Yeah, not going to happen. But there were a few reasonable priced canoes in apparent good shape, including one just hours from ending its bid cycle up in Allendale, New Jersey, and another a bit further in the future to bid ending in Roanoke, Virginia. I did the bid after checking out the description of the canoe (17’ Old Town with an extra seat and fishing pole holder installed, in good nick and well cared for, decent pictures showing it) and a few hours later, became the proud owner.

There’s a catch, of course. I’m in Maryland, a good four hours drive south. I get in touch with the seller and it turns out that he’s about to go on travel, so I have to wait a week or so before going up there.

During that week, I start to get the “What the f*** did I just do?” sensation when I get out the measuring tape and start to realize what a 17’ boat really is like. This is the advantage of a store: you can look at the thing on the shelf and it dawns on you BEFORE YOU BUY IT that maybe this is just a bit big. Seeing as how you could put your CAR in it! I have a Saturn Station Wagon which is a moderately small car... and about 3-4 feet shorter than this canoe! How am I going to transport this thing? And once I do, how on Earth am I going to handle it on my own?

A visit to the Saturn dealer for other reasons reassures me that, well tied down front and back, the canoe should be fine on the roofrack. As far as handling it on my own goes, I can get one of those little wheeled trailer things for pulling it around. Getting it on and off the car is going to be interesting, as will carrying it places where there are no roads or boat ramps. Maybe I am going to need company for these things.

Hmmm... maybe it is time to start taking this pursuing a girlfriend thing a little more seriously? :-)

Anyway, I arrange some time off work to leave here in the afternoon, get to Bergen County in the early evening, get the canoe, and drive back all in one rather long day. Specifically, yesterday.

The trip up was uneventful, but the moment of truth is interesting. First, people in New Jersey (or at the very least in Allendale) have apparently subscribed to the New Math or something. I find the street number 740 when I am looking for 700, but the house numbers are (brilliantly) very hard to spot where they exist. In fact it turns out that 700 is just two doors down from 740. Huh? I’ve been in buildings that have no thirteenth floor before, but there should twenty houses between these two addresses, right?

I get to the place, see the canoe, and it’s a beauty. For a family of four and their dog perhaps. What the f*** have I done? It’s got a nice flat wide bottom (very good for touring and lake paddling since it is stable, but not a speedy design since it puts more surface area on the water and is less streamlined. Also DEFINITELY not designed for rough or white water.) and it is quite wide. In fact when we get it up on the roof rack, I have to remove the bike rail since the canoe covers the entire roof of the car up there.

Uh oh. Putting the canoe on the car like the diagram in the manual in the roof rack says, hull up, puts the bow right smack in the middle of my view out the front of the car and dangling in the air at least six feet in front of the windscreen. I might as well drive blindfolded. We flip it over and right side up, I can see out, but I am nervous. Air pressurse should, if I understand my Physics, be trying to pull the canoe off the car as I go now, instead of pushing it down on the rack. But this is the way it fits on the car. The seller and I futz with the straps across to hold it on the rack, and double bungee cord it back and front. It seems stable enough when I try a few tug tests, but the boat does bounce around a little alarmingly when I pull out onto the road. But it does stay in place... even once I get up to highway speeds on Route 17 heading back towards the Garden State Parkway.

I do notice that I am being very gentle on the gas. The canoe seems to be just fine up there, but every time I get up around 55 miles per hour, there is some sympathetic hum that starts up from the front strap and it is like being right next to a DC-3 prop engine running full bore. Not even John Farnham cranked up well beyond my usual volume setting will drownd out the roar right above my head. Am I going to have to have my ear drums pummeled this way for four hours straight?

I also face an interesting problem once I get on the Garden State Parkway. My car very recently got an E-Tag (I think the local name is EZ-Pass, an electronic toll booth tag that goes on the windscreen underneath the center rear view mirror so it does not block the driver's view at all, but can be seen by the toll booth sensor.). Is the toll sensor going to be able to see through the rather opaque object sitting on the car?

Turns out when I get to the first of the toll booths not to be an issue: I guess the sensors must either be eye level and get in under the canoe, or use microwaves or some frequency range to which canoes are transparent. I kept aiming for the toll booths that took money as well as E-tags just in case until I’d gone through a couple of sensors just to be sure.

I should add, even in this day and age of high gas prices, the biggest cost of this expedition was tolls: the Chesapeake Bay Bridge ($2.50), the New Jersery Turnpike (about $3 each way, though it never tells me what the tolls are since in the electronic lanes, you don’t get the ticket with the price on it), the Garden State Parkway ($0.35 six times... couldn’t they just set up one set of toll booths instead of dime and quartering you every ten miles?), the Delaware Memorial Bridge ($3 for two miles... Yeah, Memorial Bridge, I'll remember you alright!), the John F. Kennedy Expressway/Delaware Turnpike ($2), and Harbour Tunnel under Baltimore ($2). Taking the Chesapeake Bay Bridge up also allowed me to avoid the Maryland Turnpike ($1?) and a second whack from the Delaware Turnpike ($2). Good thing I saved at least $400 over the price of new canoe to make this worthwhile!

The Garden State Parkway was annoying: the roar from the straps if I nudged above 55 mph was quite loud. Then I took the ramps down to get onto the New Jersey Turnpike... and once I got back up to speed, no noise. I look up out the front... and no canoe! I cannot believe the thing slid off the car without me hearing the racket, not to mention the horns from annoyed and terrified drivers behind me finging a huge object in the middle of the lane. A few tenths of a second later, it occurs to me that I can still see the two bungee cords on the front of the car leading up into the air above me, obviously still attached to something, and I can see out the rearview mirror and see the towel on the second of the two bungee lines there to warn people my car is longer than it looks. Turns out that going around one of the ramps at the posted speed was just enough to shift the canoe which now is sitting a little further back and slightly angled to the car’s forward motion. But it is secure and in place... and not making the awful roaring noise at freeway speeds. I can hear myself think again.

I take the next food stop to pull over and get a very late dinner, but not before first checking out the canoe on the car. Let me tell you, the car looks VERY strange in the parking lot in the night with this monster on top. The shift took tension off the front strap, allowing it to slide a little, so I set things back to right and snug it all up carefully again, get the dinner, and head on home again.

Everything is quite secure and fine and the roar is still gone, but getting up to freeway speeds (and the speed limit on the NJ Turnpike is a swift 65 mph these days), the car develops another interesting habit. The canoe bounce around a little in the wind and tends to take the car with it. I’m secure on the road and the canoe is secure on the roof, but it is a little like being in an airplane in turbulence... and I’ve got a long way home. The canoe will do this to me anytime the car is over 60 mph the whole way home, so I am feeling MIGHTY tired by the time the off-ramp to the last freeway on the way home comes up. I’ve been muscling the steering wheel for nearly three hours by this point and managed to spend the evening right from eating dinner all the way back home like I was in the aggitate spin cycle in the washing machine...

I leave the canoe on the car overnight. Like washing the car, this of course summons punishment from the rain gods since the canoe is right side up on the car and filled with several gallons of water in the morning. Just what I need: MORE weight to deal with as I get the monster down. I succeed, but I'm not sure how I will gracefully do this in the future on my own.

But that is for the future. I’m excited about my new toy and looking forward to driving out to Southern Maryland some time soon and taking it out on the Potomac, or maybe exploring some other public waterways in the near future. But who would have thought I would need air sickness bags in the car to drive the canoe places?

Ghost Fleet of Mallows Bay

A few years ago, my friend Helen told me about one of Washington’s Ten Best Kept Secrets: The Ghost Fleet of the Potomac. An article in a Washington Flyer magazine had mentioned this ship graveyard on the Potomac River that is little known even amongst locals yet a long standing testament to government gridlock and congressional folly. The graveyard is located on the Potomac River in southern Maryland, and it may well be the largest single graveyard of ships in the world in one location. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 ships are left abandoned on a spot called Mallows Bay a few miles south and across the river from Quantico, Virginia. But there is no access from the land side, and the water is very shallow in the area which prevents any but the most shallow draft craft from entering the area. Essentially that means a canoe or kayak.

I was fascinated and did a bit more reading about the site. The most detailed resource I laid hands on is historian Donald G. Shomette’s The Ghost Fleet of Mallows Bay, but he also provides an interesting condensed history of the fleet of ships online on the Maryland Department of Natural Resources web site.

The vast majority of the ships are abandoned wooden hulled steam ships built in a crash construction program after the United States entered the First World War. Estimates at the time suggested that the U.S. would need of the order of 6 million tons of shipping capacity to transport troops and equipment, which was roughly twelve times the amount of shipping constructed in the twenty years prior. Congress acted quickly to propose the construction of some 1000 shipsfrom a standardized design made with either Douglas fir or white pine. Of the proposed 1000, contracts to build 731 were drawn up.

The timber construction had two major benefits: the ships could be made more rapidly than those with steel hulls and their construction would not tie up existing ship building capacity. The timbers in question were available in good supply. The objective was to make the ships within 18 to 24 months. The ships would be powered by steam, a relatively simple power plant design geared more towards rapid production than long term viability.

However, no such large program can ever be pulled off without snarls and problems, and indeed a number came up. There would be political infighting, bureaucratic foot dragging and excessive documentation requirements (a sort of ISO 9000 certification prerunner), to unanticipated technical issues. The first ship was completed by December 1, 1917, just nine months after President Wilson had placed the U.S. on a war footing. But by October 1918, only 134 boats were complete and another 263 were partway constructed. When the war ended on November 11th, not a single one of the boats had yet attempted an Atlantic crossing.

The program did not shut down immediately with the war’s end, however, and builders continued to finish up their contract obligations to make the boats. Some did eventually see trans-Atlantic service, and in all, 264 were completed and brought in service.

After the war, world trade contracted severely (in fact by some economic estimates, world trade would not recover to its 1914 levels until around the 1970s), and with the reduction in trade, there was a huge glut of excess shipping capacity, refered to as the “The Great Tie-Up of 1920” as shipping was brought into port and essentially abandoned. The wooden boats suffered an additional blow as their coal power steam engines were rendered obsolete by the advent of the more fuel efficient and powerful diesel engines.

The remnants of this fleet then suffered further blows. Constructed for a cost in the range of $700,000 - $1 million per ship (very roughly, $12 - $16 million 2004 dollars, or about in the range of $4 billion total, putting it in the same general ballpark as a major contemporary space mission such as the Hubble Space Telescope. Such comparisons, however, are somewhat faulty both in the very large rough assumptions of inflation and the growth of the economy. $1 million was a much larger fraction of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product of 1920 than an inflation adjusted $16 million is today, meaning that the cost of this fleet could easily be compared with annual costs of entire space program for a year or two, not just a single major mission.). Coupled with their construction faults from rushed efforts to complete them, and obsolete design, the wooden ships were quite a financial millstone and Congress sold off the salvage rights to some 233 or so of the boats to rid itself of the $50,000 a month storage costs.

The series of salvage operations and events are better documented elsewhere, so I shall not pursue them further, save to say that by the 1940s, most of these hulks, and a few others brought in for salvage, were abandoned in Mallows Bay. Western Marine and Salvage Company attempted and failed to economically recover the scrap metal value of the ships it purchased from the government in 1922. At the height of the Second World War, scrap metal shortages brought Bethelem Steel to attempt the same feat without economic success. The fleet came to be left to amateur scrap metal recovery efforts, and ultimately to be a largely forgotten graveyard of ships tossed aside by economic and political events.

And so over time, the ship graveyard on the Potomac passed from living memory. The hulks gradually rotted away for the most part, but sedimentation from the river filled in around them and preserved some or left shadows of their former presence in the form of ship hull shaped islands in which small trees and grasses took root. The shallow waters of Mallows Bay, sheltered by the hulks, became an area where sea grasses struggling elsewhere took root and provided natural habitat for fish, water birds, and crabs.

The Maryland Department of Natural Resources has been discussing for some years now the idea of turning the area into a nature reserve and creating access from the banks. As things stand now, however, the only way to reach the Ghost Fleet is by paddling in by kayak or canoe.

And thus begins my own personal adventure.

A little research on my part found only three access points to the river nearby. The first is a marina at Quantico across the river. This seems to be the most popular route to the graveyard to judge from web log reports from avid kayaks. The Washington Flyer also listed an outfitter working from Quantico offering rather costly guided kayak trips across the river to the site out of Quantico. A second is a boat ramp or pier located at Purse State Park on the Maryland side about two miles south of the Bay. However, neither Purse State Park nor Quantico appeared, at least in my research, to offer kayak or canoe rentals for the avid yet unequipped adventurer, not withstanding the guided tours, documentation of which my web research failed to find (though the Washington Flyer did list name and contact details, long since lost). The third put-in point near the river and upstream a few miles is Smallwood State Park, and here I found that canoe rentals were available at the park in addition there being a put-in point. Glory be!

So on one fine sunny October morning, my friend Helen and Melissa, another friend talked into the day’s adventure, joined me for the drive down past Indian Head to Mattawoman Creek and the Smallwood State Park. We got there close to opening time and rented a canoe and set off.

I had estimated from a map that the mouth of the Mattawoman Creek on the Potomac was roughly six miles north of Mallows Bay. A very little math concludes that this is a journey of about twelve miles. This should have rung alarm bells in my mind: a twelve mile day hike is a reasonably substantial hike, and paddling is hardly speedier nor more effortless than hiking. Furthermore, not quite figuring into that mental math was a non-trivial distance of perhaps a mile and a half from the park to the mouth of the Mattawoman Creek. But with three people, I figured we would have no problem. Or perhaps more accurately, I guess I just did not figure.

And off we sent into the wild blue yonder. It was an easy voyage out to Mattawoman Creek from the park’s edge and a pleasant bit of paddling down into the Potomac on what was to prove to be a very pleasant, warm, and sunny day on the river. Once clear of the Mattawoman Creek, we quickly came upon our first wreck of the day.




Alas, this steel hull remnant, whose history I have been unable to find, is not one of the Mallows Bay Ghost Fleet and served only to taunt us onward. After shifting seats to give tired arms a rest, we paddled southward with the river’s flow down past the next river open and under the massive power pylons across the river near Quantico. After a good two hours or so, we had managed to merely arrive at the starting point of typical full day guided (and expensive) kayaking trips from Quantico, though at least we were on the correct side of the river. Onward we went.

By around 1 PM, tired and sunburnt, it became clear we were not going to reach our destination. Reconstructing our position from maps after the fact, I believe we got within a half mile of Sandy Point, the northernmost limit of Mallows Bay. But it is probably a blessing we never got there to see what we would be missing and thus turned back somewhat unsatisfied, but without the sense of having narrowly missed our goals. Not far back towards the park, we found a place to pull off, complete with a picnic table not far from the water’s edge, took in a pleasant picnic lunch and break, then turned back north for Mattawoman Creek and the state park.

Unbeknownst to us, our presence, or rather our lack of presence, had been noticed by the park service and the outfitter renting the canoes there. Concerned that we had strayed into a power boat right of way and been swamped and perhaps either stranded or run down and drowned, they called in the Natural Resources Police.

Oblivious to this, we noticed a boat coming up in our general direction while paddling hard up the Potomac back towards Smallwood State Park. Complete with police lights. Believe it or not, you don’t have to be on the road to be “curbed” by the police. Yeap, a power boat got a canoe to “pull over”. Not for speeding, of course, but it turned out that in one of those criminal acts that is plainly apparent after the fact, but never crossed our minds, we had in effect stolen the canoe for the day. It was never intended to be allowed out of the state park. We got a gentle lecture from the police officer who mostly seemed relieved to realize he was not going to have to spend his afternoon dragging the bottom of Mattawoman Creek looking for drowned corpses of three city idiots who got a canoe run down by an inattentive and possibly drunk power boater. He did warn us of two things as we headed back. First, there would be an officer awaiting us at the dock to “talk to us” and that the closing time for the dock was actually an hour earlier than advertised to us before because it was the last day of the season and there was an annual end of season picnic for the staff and could we please pick up the pace to get back in time.

We did our best, but recall this was a very long paddle, especially considering how long a distance we had gone already and that the current was now somewhat against us. Anyone who thinks they can arm wrestle Melissa or myself or Helen might be in for a rude surprise. We did quite a muscling job to get back. And while we got such pleasant rewards as seeing a bald eagle fishing near us on the way back in, we still made it about five minutes late.

For the original closing time, that is, not the early one.

Needless to say, we were not expecting to be very popular when we got there. And the promised long arm of the law was there to give us the stern lecture about the evils of renting canoes with ill intent, with scaring park employees, and denying them their picnic time by coming in so damned late. We pleaded innocence on nicking off with the canoe off the grounds of the state park, claiming with some believable gullibility that we had not realized that that was one of the rules (and quite frankly, given the size of the water area of the park, I to this day cannot fathom why anyone would rent a canoe under those limitations: paddle a hundred metres in a few minutes, and it is time to give up and come home). We apologized for the inconvience of our late arrival and our own failure to correctly anticipate the level of effort and hencetime for our voyage.

I should at this point add three important points to this narritive. The natural resources policeman at the dock assigned to give us the stern lecture was very young officer and male. Helen is drop down gorgeous, and Melissa is quite the head turner herself, though having dated her at one point, I will confess to not being an completely disinterested party in that assessment. The poor officer never had a chance: he would try to give me the stern lecture and then couldn’t help himself but moderate his tone in Helen’s presence.

Lesson learned: never get in trouble with the law while canoeing without a gorgeous blonde or two around to help you out.

Truth be told, the officer was (in a male sense) not to shabby himself. Or as Helen put it over ice cream later “He could have spanked me, as long as he kept those beautiful blue eyes open when he did.”

Sunburnt and forgiven by the law and surprisingly enough, not told to never ever rent canoes from them ever again (We haven’t anyway), we took our sunburnt leave as the park closed for the late afternoon and the poor lady whom had patiently waited for us for hours put the canoe away and closed the shop for the seaon. A stop on the way home for ice cream and our day was done.

But the siren song of Mallows Bay still calls to me years later. I wish to rest my eyes on Wilson’s Folly and the hulks of yesteryear on the edges of the Potomac, to visit with time to spare to explore, to seek, to ask, to understand, to do so legally and unencumbered, and perhaps to pose that most wonderous question...

So what are the other nine Best Kept Secrets of Washington? And I can I visit them without getting in trouble with the law this time?

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.