[See this entry for an informal Part 1 to this Part 2. Edits done 6/27/13, with adjusted section indicated.]
Ronald Reagan famously said that
the best thing for the inside of a person is the outside of a horse.
(Meanwhile, Groucho Marx is alleged to have said that “Outside of a dog, a book
is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”) Probably
another good thing for your insides (emotionally and otherwise) is the demands
placed on your body and motivation by a long hike on the Appalachian
Trail.
Yesterday (June 13), I was in a
municipal/local library in Orange County, N.Y., over the state border from my usual base of
operations, northwest New Jersey.
I go to the Orange County location quite a lot (alternating to some extent with
a municipal library in Morris County, N.J.), and this day was a fairly average
day for a library stop. I had been there maybe an hour and a half, on the
computer. I was about ready—or would be before very long—to quit computer work
for the time being, and take a lunch break. It was maybe 11:30 a.m. And amid
the usual goings-on amid random other patrons, two hikers came in, looking like
quite a different kettle of fish.
It was a couple, a young man and
woman probably in their early twenties. They had big backpacks, the tops up
high over their heads, squared off; if the backpacks had been all white and
silver, and looking texturally like hazmat-type accoutrements, they could have
looked like participants in a Star Wars
or superhero film production. They settled at a table not far from me, where,
not long before, some local elderly women had been playing a game.
The hikers unburdened themselves
of their backpacks and seemed settled on a certain agenda. One part of it was
to use the computers. As a general matter, guests to that library, of course,
can use the computers, having to get a special logging-in; but not all come
with huge backpacks on them. But hikers of the Appalachian Trail (A.T.), as I
thought these folks probably were, typically have map-related info with them on
what local towns and other amenities to go to for food, shelter, Internet
access, etc. (In my township, in the center of town, a little church used to
serve as an overnight-stay facility for A.T. hikers; I don’t know if it still
does.)
Prelude—hikers glanced off a roadside
I thought maybe—I’m still not
100 percent sure about this—that I had seen this couple the day before, at
about 4:30, when I was heading home from a trip Wednesday to the same New York
library. I was driving up Barrett Road, an often-steep, winding road that is
merely a paved-over old farm road, one of the least re-engineered roads in the
township (and hence a big pain in the tail to drive), and part of it actually legally
sanctioned against much improvement by its passing through an historically
designated old farm, the High Breeze (or Barrett) farm. The winding road tops
out on a hill just before entering my community of Barry
Lakes, which is wedged between extents
of the few-thousand-acre Wawayanda
State Park (which in the
early-mid 1980s has subsumed the High Breeze farm). [Start of adjusted section] A few hundred feet below and north of this
topping-out, the A.T. crosses Barrett
Road. It used to cross (at a
treacherous crook in the road)—pretty much directly across the
road—from and into woods closer to Barry Lakes than where it crosses now.
Now, it emerges from the west just a short distance down from what used to be called the Reynolds House, a house
that had been occupied many years ago, from what I’ve heard, by a Dr.
Livingston, whose name was given to some tracts of land (and some
deep-in-the-woods ponds) that are now part of the state park. Then the A.T. enters the woods to the east of Barrett Road, pretty much directly across the road, and climbs up a rocky former "woods road," up a hill in the woods. [End of adjusted section] All this
local-yokel stuff is to orient you to the homely, rather remote location I had
seen a couple of hikers entering the woods at that woods road, then quite obviously
A.T. hikers, all colorful clothes and slightly awkward bearing, thus seeming not
“from the area” at all, but game to plug along the trail. This was about six
miles by car from the New York library I’ve mentioned.
The couple I saw in the library
on Thursday struck me as very similar to those I’d seen the evening before. I
would like to say it was definitely them, but I did not have enough visual
memory of the two I’d seen on Wednesday to be sure. But as these people in the
library on Thursday seemed, for all their gear and slightly outdoor-burnished
look, like nothing so much as A.T. hikers, my mental wheels went into motion
“figuring out (or, depending on specific points, speculating) some things about
them.”
Getting oriented via A.T. knowledge and weather conditions
One thing is, I am not sure
about where the A.T. winds through Orange
County, N.Y., to know
whether it runs anywhere near the library I go to, but it’s possible. And could
this couple have spent all of a half a day going from the Barrett Road location, to near the
library? You do some quick figuring…. Wednesday’s weather had been very nice—sunny
and breezy, almost like September weather. Thursday was drearily rainy, with a large
weather system that was forecast to bring tornados, hail, and flooding to
central and southern Jersey. These hikers
could have camped out somewhere between Barrett Road and somewhere worthy of
pausing in over-the-border New
York State.
There had been (and maybe still is) a hikers’ sleepover cabin in Wawayanda Park, on the A.T., maybe a couple miles’
trekking from Barrett Road
(I had hiked this stretch years ago, and had seen the cabin).
Say the hikers stayed at that
cabin. And say they got up at about 7 a.m. on Thursday. They would have seen
the inclement weather, with grey clouds and occasional spritzing of rain making
things ugly. Would they have resolved to undertake a big day of getting a lot
of miles walked? Or would they have taken the opportunity to stop at a local
place with Internet access? My guess would have been the latter.
Considering opportunities on Thursday
Aside from whether these two
hikers were the ones I’d seen on Wednesday (and if they weren’t, some of my
speculations just noted might be invalidated), these two kids on Thursday were
a sight. Now, you may figure that if I knew about A.T. stuff as I did—and
indeed, I had been part of a local trail-maintenance group that did some work
on repairing/beefing-up the trail as it climbed the steep face of Hamburg
Mountain roughly 20 years ago—I would have approached these kids and made small
talk. And I did consider it.
But I held off. I had been doing
some computer stuff; I didn’t expect, or want, to get into such a conversation;
I was tired and wanted to go “hibernate” with a lunch break. Plus, more to the
point, I thought I would sound dorky saying, “Hey, you guys hiking the A.T.? I
thought I saw you yesterday afternoon….” It seems the days of being able to
start up such small talk with strangers are largely past for me, or at least
“in abeyance.” Even though we’re told in media campaigns here that “we’re
stronger than the storm,” some of us, in some sense, are still licking our
wounds. Or we’re slowly getting back up to speed with our lives. We’re sort of
laying low, taking it careful. Lots of young people seem paranoid; news reports
of terrorists, and assaulters, and the like make it seem like you can’t trust
anyone. Erring on the side of an assumption of others’ paranoia, in some
instances, seems wise.
So I just looked at the two
hikers, trying to be discreet, making my inferences. (America is no longer so
innocent, Messieurs Thoreau and Emerson.)
Two youths in hiker-existentialist mode
Funny thing—they both noticed me
well enough. I.e., I stood out from the constellation of folks there, to them;
I’m not sure if it was because I was so alert, with genuine interest, to them.
Though at one point the young
woman seemed to be “hooked” by my awareness, this wasn’t the usual “paranoia of
a young woman about a man’s flirtatious looks”—thank heavens for small
miracles. She may have assumed I was intrigued by her for her being in vivid hiker
mode.
The two seemed “in their own
world” to an extent. They seemed hale, hearty, like two dedicated sorts who—as
they in fact were—were going about their daily business with a lot of clearheaded,
can-do body-demanding activity. No couch potato slugs, they. They seemed young
and idealistic in a sense. They seemed very tight with each other, even as they
were a little aloof to others—but, I am quick to note, they weren’t arrogant or
flaky. Not as hippies would have been, say, 40 years ago. No druggie
woolly-headedness.
The young woman had on tight
shorts like bikers’ pants (Speedo-type shorts? I don’t know that type/brand of
clothes…). She seemed self-contained and well-toned like an efficient marathon
runner. The guy had gone off pretty readily to go do his thing on a computer,
well across the room from me. The girl, nearer to me, was at the table where
some of their gear had been laid out, engrossedly tending to things there.
It was a good day for them to be
inside. It was ugly-rainy out, or steel-wool-clouds–cloudy, if not actually
raining at the time.
One thing I noted is that it
might not have been a good idea to get close to the young hikers, because they
may have smelled pretty ripe—Sasquatch city. Because as clean as these
clean-living-types probably tried to be, when your life is outside 95 percent
of the time, and hiking among jungle-leafy woods, you’re inevitably going to smell.
No scented body wash, no underarm charm.
A tip of the hat
So I left the computer area, the
hikers behind me, no conversation struck up with them. This seemed tasteful.
They didn’t necessarily want to be bothered by an old library haunter like
myself, and they were young people undertaking the quest that so many opt to do
when they’re young and the idea seizes them: to hike the A.T. (Many years ago,
I considered it.) Some hike the whole thing (usually, you start in the southern
states in cooler weather—starting in what are warmer climes in Georgia even in
March or so, and head north, ending your trek in the late summer or fall when
weather conditions at the trail’s end in Maine or New Hampshire are more
tolerable—the whole thing takes about five months, I think). And these kids
were hiking north. But they may have been doing a partial hike, doing only part
of the trail (maybe a few hundred miles), which is anyone’s choice.
