Pace

Before leaving on the trail, Tasha and I worked out that we could meet up for a long weekend in Gatlinburg, TN at the end of her spring break. The timing wasn't perfect, but close enough. Gatlinburg is a resort town with easy access to both the trail and the Knoxville Airport, so I figured it made more sense to meet up here than anywhere else. I'm really happy about how quickly i was able to reach Gatlinburg. I got in two days early even after purposefully hiking short days so i wouldn't arrive with much extra time. It's getting to the point where anything less than a 15 mile day seems quick. Hopefully after I get through the second half of the Smokies, things will pick up even more and I'll be able to cycle up to about 20 miles a day. This is good news.

Report on Smokies

So, here I am in Gatlinburg, TN, nestled into the foothills of the Smokey Mountains. The last three days of walking since I entered the Smokies at Fontana Dam, NC have been particularly treacherous. The Smokies are home to some of the roughest terrain on the trail and I happened to arrive right at the tail end of a rather sizable snow storm which deposited about a foot of snow or more over everything higher than about 3000 feet. After the climb into the park up Shuckstack Mountain, I haven't been lower than about 5000 feet so it's pretty much been a winter wonderland. Hiking in snow presents some novel challenges. Prior to the last three days, I often awoke to light dustings or maybe an inch or two of accumulation, but nothing that impedes progress to a noticeable degree. Having to negotiate the trail with a foot of snow on the ground is quite another thing entirely. Monday was my first day in the park and snow was continually falling into my boots so that by the end of the day they were thoroughly soaked, after a night of 15ish degree weather (which is pretty much the standard so far), I awoke to find my boots frozen solid. The next day things got even more grim. Walking through snow mostly makes one hungry and tired, but things get worse as soon as the sun comes out and snow turns into slush. The trail tends to be recessed four to six inches from the surrounding landscape, so on Tuesday with the sun beating down all day, the trail turned into a canyon of six inches of shitty whitish brownish slush. I only walked about 12 miles on Tuesday, but it was by far my grumpiest day on the trail. It was hot and cold at the same time and pretty much every step sucked for one reason or another. Wednesday morning started out pretty rough as well, the slush had turned into Ice over night and so getting up or down hill (which is pretty much all one does on the Appalachian Trail) became rather a harrowing ordeal, but by the end of the day, the trail started to poke through and there was a lot more brown than white on the ground.

index

(3/20) Rainy day in Franklin, North Carolina staying at the Haven Hotel for the night.

Number of days hiking so far:9
Number of miles walked: about 100
Longest Day: about 15 Miles
Number of non-human/canine mammals seen:0
Number of pounds lost: about 4
Number of people I've met who've worked for some sort of secret government agency or military special ops:2
Number of people I've met who claim to have killed people:2
Number of people I've believed about this:2
Number of people I've met who claim to have killed people while working as a UPS delivery driver: 1
Number of people I've met who claim to have been shot by a sniper while on patrol "somewhere abroad, that's all I'll say.":1

Helen, Ga

So, I've come about sixty miles averaging between 8 and 12 miles a day. It's my 7th day out and I've decided to take a day off (in trail jargon, that's called a zero day). I met this kid Brad on the trail the other day, and we agreed to split a hotel room in Helen, Ga so we could sleep on beds and nurse our various aches. Last night we got into town, checked into a hotel and found a super-dope Mexican restaurant run by a bunch of dudes from Juarez. It was really good. I got some chicken enchiladas. I ate them.

Now I'm at the Helen Public Library using their internet to write on my blog, check the extended forecast, catch up on boingboing.net, etc.

SO here's the thing with Helen. In the 1960s Helen was pretty much a standard mountain resort town nestled into the Chattahoochee Natl Forest. Problem was, at some point, the tourism industry started floundering things were looking bleak for our fair city. Anyway, the village elders (or something) got together and hired a german artist/architect to come up with some way to save the town's economy. The result is mindbending. Helen is now a pretty alpine-themed quasi-Bavarian resort town. The entire place, which runs for one mile along highway 76 in NE Georgia, looks like this...





Try as I might, I can't seem to induce any sort cynicism about Helen. It's super weird, but it's charming in its peculiarity and particularity. The people are really really friendly, and the town seems to do very well for itself. People come here for honeymoons, people come here to summer, and people come here en masse to get shitfaced all through October. It's nice to see some sort of forethought in the architectural scheme of a little community,rather than a redundant string of applebees and walmarts. Anyway, go to Helen, take your kids. It's cheap and fun and the Hofer Cafe/Bakery has really good breakfast. I also saw a guy selling painted rocks on the side of the highway. If they didn't weigh about 10 pounds each, I might have bought the paisley one.

la-la-lies

On my drive home, I was getting real stressed out about all the stuff I had to take care of in Dallas before I left to hike the AT. Long story short, I pushed back my starting date from this Saturday (mar 4) to next Friday (mar 10). What does this mean? Not too much, even if you are coming to meet me on the trail. I expect you to show up on the same date. Mostly I just have to walk a little faster.

Neon Vomit

nb. Neon Vomit is the name of a hipstery quasi-rap group in Providence. I'm not much of a fan, but I'll still crib the name because it fits oh so well.

In the novel Neuromancer, the rather oracular William Gibson writes of future cities which, having expanded out of their geographically determinate centers, assume the form of 'sprawls.' He imagines, for example, a consistently urban expanse which extends from Atlanta to Boston. Dallas isn't exactly like this yet, but the facts of it's geographical particularity as a major city on the Great Plains whose potential for expansion is encumbered neither by sea nor mountain, harbor a viral quality. When one drives into Dallas from the North--which is to say, when one crosses the Texas/Oklahoma border on either I-35 or 75--one immediately encounters a succession of exurbs followed by a further ring of suburbs. One does not encounter Dallas proper for nearly 70 miles, but the interstitial area, between the borders and the proper city limits is nearly entirely incorporated. A great deal of these outlying areas, say 99%, have to quality of being discreet architectonic iterations of a platonic Suburbia : a redundant cycle of housing developments punctuated by chain restaurants punctuated by housing developments ad nauseum. Dallas proper has largely the same feel.

This time on the drive in, I was struck by a singularly desperate image: a Macaroni Grill sitting directly opposite an Olive Garden on either side of I-35 about 30 miles North of Dallas. These two low-slung buildings, each with their own set of ancillaries (TGI Fridays, Bennigans, Chipotle, etc.), seemed to me to be squaring off, locked in an immortal struggle for simulacral dominance ("There can be only one!"). Some playwright or epic poet, more competent than myself, could no doubt write an achingly beautiful work turning on the false conflict at play here. Lear always choosing the wrong daughter not out of folly, but because there can be no right choice among equal distortions. A scene might go like this:

Susan: "Where shall we go to dinner tonight?"

Brad: "Tough question, maybe Italian?"

Susan: "Okay, should we go to Macaroni Grill or the Olive Garden."

Brad: "How can we ever know which is best, or which are the right criteria for choosing best?"

Here, I'd imagine, is where both Brad and Susan's heads explode and blood spews out from their necks quite liberally (a la the play scene in the Addams Family movie).

Larp

Apropos nothing, somebody should find a way to watch this movie in its entirety:

http://www.darkonthemovie.com/trailers_qt_med.html