“Yesterday, I got so old I felt like I could die. Yesterday, I got so old It made me want to cry…”
– The Cure, Inbetween Days
After walking away from the Mountainside Cafe, I meet a little free library on trail with an assortment of…actually good books.
Most of the time I lament at the fact these things are usually filled with Bibles, James Patterson novels, and dime store James Patterson clones that learned how to self-publish on Amazon. Little leaflets of paper hang out of several like a new type of white blaze. Each piece of paper has text clarifying what states in America they are banned from schools. Always seemingly for racial content, open sexuality, or stances against tyrannyof a large empire. I decide the extra weight of two are worth carrying.
One a nonfiction book called Between The World and Me, alongside the other called Their Eyes Were Watching God walks away with me.
I shower in a very public shower at an electrical station.
It felt kind of mancamp-esque like the bridge I walked across many journal entries ago. In the daylight, it was safer though and I charged some batteries. People say working folks like this aren’t a threat… but the truth of that in my experience only extends to those that look like them. I know circles of middle class white men can quickly become a boot on your face to protect fragile identities of ego wrapped around pieces of property that are colonized into each individual orbit.
I walk on from there and the sunshine meets new colors of rainbow flags in a town called Salisbury.
It has a feeling of both kindness and gentrification abound. The store in town has seating and tables all around it in the shade. Even with public charging ports, it’s quite notable to me how all this infrastructure exists without a homeless person in sight. I stuff myself with a sub sandwich and refill on groceries at the overpriced tourist store. The deli at least is the same price as any other in Connecticut and there are some deals with items being half off to sell before they expire.
I sit outside charging and occasionally the locals ask about the trail. I do an enlightened sort of code-switching where I put on the mask of any other thru-hiker with my answers that are like water around a frog. Notably it seems if I say I was born in Missouri, but don’t feel I’m from there anymore it leads to talking about working at ski resorts and my many seasons of nomadic life on a bicycle. Which sidesteps the growing knowledge about the giant tornado that ripped through my hometown that haunts the constant small-talk since the Netflix doc.
With a storm rolling in this afternoon, I decide to go to the library. Which is apparently the oldest or one of the oldest in the country, looking like a small castle so out of place in Suburban America. Inside I’m told the teen section is the best spot for a hiker to charge belongings and sit on a couch a few hours. I’m surrounded by books of other worlds and the types of hidden messages I’d have longed for in libraries of the bible-belt keeping the mind narrow. The shelves seem to sing of trans, indigenous, and black lives most do not.
My phone spirals fragments of real conversations I wish I was having out here from an account called @IndigenousWomenHike. One about Independence Day being the Fourth of the Lie and an indigenous perspective on trail names. Both sentiments of which I agree.
The chance of rain becomes a storm that knocks the power out twice with a major downpour. A man at a computer is frustrated at the librarians a moment because of the internet being out, like they have some God-like control over the weather or Internet provider. I stare outside thankful to not be walking in the downpour. Thankful to both the library and the universe the rain stops as the library begins to close.
A librarian seems surprised I am going to hike on to the shelter instead of staying in town, she says I’m going to slip up on the rocks. I say it’s just a few miles and I’ll be okay. It’s almost like she wants to offer something out of empathy for a perceived threat to my wellbeing, but does not.
I get to the shelter at dark and there’s a couple teenage kids in it.
“Shirt, now!” Says the boy to the other. Snapping his fingers at the other. The other rushes to cover his bare chest with a rain jacket like he’s committed some sin of nakedness and apologizes for being human like someone taught him to.
“It’s cool.” I say, “I was just looking for the tenting around the shelter but saw some spots back toward trail.”
I set up my tent as the darkness falls and eat a packed out deli sandwich.
In the morning I really embrace an idea of aimlessness as my goal. As usually the first to break camp because I always wake up to the first sound of the birds like my circadium rythym is entangled with it after so many years tenting in the outdoors. Instead, I don’t really move to pack camp until about 11. There’s something about all that mile crunching hiker energy leaving the area that makes it quite peaceful.
I walk ten miles or so to another shelter spot and learn the next day has trail magic, as well as the first inexpensive place to stay in leaving Connecticut.
It is a very cruisy morning of mostly flats and downhills.
I notice a gigantic beautiful butterfly ahead and ask myself if this is someone gone from my life now visiting me again, who might it be?
Inside…a familiar chanting began.
“No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA.”
“No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA.”
The memories seemed to spiral at me.
Then there he was, Stu. I hadn’t thought of Stu in a long time. Stu was an older man I met while in a political camp around an ICE facility protesting the separation of children from their parents at borders and in some ways the existence of borders in general. He was one of the original 7 to risk handcuffing themselves in front of the facility and being arrested.
Stu and I made pretty quick friends. I’d never met an older white man so accepting of others so unlike him. Never met a man his age of grey hair who could understand the nuance of a pronoun or sit with the intensity of colonial issues at hand. I had learned in my time around Stu he had spent a very long time as a homeless person and much of his political activism surrounded helping organize camps with other homeless people. A talent well-suited for political actions that require the establishment of a Temporary Autonomous Zone.
During that time, friendships of care were established through common causes of the action. There was a tiredness and a kindness about Stu. Like he could see the constant violence of street sweeps begin inside many people in their desire to compare or constantly be above others – even on our side – yet would respond with patience and perspective. After the solidarity and various funding walked away, people had to move on with their lives. Full-time activists return to working to survive and slowly people like Stu or I disappeared from many lives. Stu took his own life, I think to touch a moment of those borders between people of higher classes willing to listen, to help, and then disappear is a loneliness he couldn’t bear to face alone.
Rather than fall into that despair, I began to build a touring bicycle to travel on…
At the present moment, I approach a large trail magic tarp tent off trail on some farm land. I learn they are volunteers with a church group that raises money to do these months on trail. They don’t talk about God, but occasionally they do talk about kindness. Which in many ways is the same.
I eat three cheeseburgers and learn I can camp at the community center in Great Barrington. The camping is free, but it’s $8 to use the facilities with showers, a sauna, and pool during open hours. After surviving Connecticut in hobo mode, just absolutely refusing to be kettled into an economic place of paying $50 for a bunk or $100+ for a room. The community center sounded just right. Once there, I took the longest hot high pressure shower and was thankful the front desk guy gave me a ziploc with hygiene stuff as trail magic for hikers. It is notable there is an intersex inclusive pride flag out front, backed up with a hall of gender neutral bathrooms with showers to use instead of the usual binary locker rooms. I daydream about writing a sort of intersectional DEI survival guide of the Appalachian Trail. Something that doesn’t exist in any hiking guide or seems to be erased from FarOut comments, like certain books on shelves.
There’s no bathroom or water outside, but the tenting is in a nice field. I decide before bed I would also take the next day off to rest on the cheap. I get even cheaper with Salisbury steaks to microwave and bread instead of eating out. I am sort of emotionally overwhelmed, but holding it down because I’m in public and yet just don’t feel up to hiking. I spend hours plotting a flip-flop to Maine, but can’t get a reservation for Katahdin on a short notice. When the next day rolls around, the desire to hike is still not there and I try to hold to my values of aiming for a happy state of aimlessness. I decide to bus to the next trail town up called Dalton, where I met more kindness from librarians to belong somewhere.
In the afternoon, I walk over to the community center there to shower as they won’t let the hikers in until after 4pm. Which I learn is because they have gendered open floor showers and the dynamics of strange adults/ children in the nude makes everyone uncomfortable. I discover they actually have secret gender neutral showers in the all gender restroom downstairs. Which is a far better showering experience.
I camp on a famous trail angel, Tom Levardi’s yard. He says the night before there was eight hikers here and the neighbors were throwing a party with unlimited food. But honestly I’m glad it’s just me and the quiet. He says something about waking up to a guy sleeping on his picnic table, saying he was going south. He says he figured the guy was homeless.
I just picture Stu sleeping here, somewhere between all the prisons the world thinks up.
I decide rather than cheat with the bus, I will walk the 9+ miles to the next town with a free camping spot for hikers. It only takes me half a day and the view on the Cheshire Rocks of the river and Mount Greylock in the distance is worth it. The processing of my feelings is worth the walk too. As I realize I’m taking on something like Stu’s loneliness and conclusion as the only somewhere the world tells me I belong.
I think aimlessness with a backpack really puts into perspective the homelessness feeling of it. It gets louder in everyone around you. In the talks of expensive gear and who is more deserving of places to camp. All the labels. The fear of the less fortunate and homeless. Nobody suspects a a homeless Stu-like Buddha or a Christ, but a robbery or worse. Then in doing so they suffer it a thousand times for every single time it might actually happen. Gentrification in cities is kind of the power dynamics of whiteness (or any person living outside being relational to the whole) put to economic privileges that drive up the expense while sweeping the people the system chews up off the streets. For the first time I’m seeing the aspects of the larger society reflected in the trail community. There is no escape on the AT from it.
I have decided on one more free day of rest and then I will walk on north for as long as it feels right…
The Father Tom campsite is nice, but fills with tents later in the night. I finish reading the last of the two books, Their Eyes Were Watching God. In it a hurricane meets me in the present moment as a tornado. A point near the end of the plot where it talked about the animals and people fleeing the wind as one with no food chain between them sticks out. The lack of conquest in every direction. Reminds me of times after the tornado. How people were sometimes after Katrina or Helene. How they are in political encampments.
The relationality of it.
How it tends not to be hiking circles…like Salisbury packed into backpacks, minds, and private property signed fences around the hearts you meet night after night.
Something about all this sits heavy on my chest like a pink cat blowing smoke in my face this town might be named after. A grief that spots to stay like this, hamburgers at an intersection, and much kindness is reserved for the respectable people creating a harsh world for people like Stu. This conquest in every directions kills freedom. The seemingly opposite energy of what is out here and Stu in my mind, brings the storm to a standstill where I almost don’t hike on.
In true wild card aimless behavior, I gamble with a Greyhound ticket after two nights of hiker crowds at the Father Tom Campsite and inability to SOBO from Katahdin, I decide on a spur of the moment to jump up to Hanover. Truly the inspiration is a man with an American flag buff around his neck within minutes of meeting me, asks if I hiked into the Father Tom Campsite or had been living there a while. He then sets up his tent next to mine and tosses and turns unable to sleep until long after midnight.
I decide to walk the whites and maybe Maine without the bubble.
Hanover is welcoming beyond any experience. It reminds me of Julian on the PCT. All these stores thru-hikers get free snacks at. I feel like a kid in a thru-hiker costume trick-or-treating the Dartmouth college town. The pizza place Ramunto’s gives me a free slice…and then a free whole margherita pizza. While devouring it, a song by The Cure I hadn’t heard in a very long time plays on the restaurant sound system. The local recreation area Storrs Pond gives me a $50 camping area for free along with a hot shower.
Then the next morning, I have a late start writing this at Dirt Cowboy Cafe and visiting the Hanover edition of Left Bank Books in search of a better conversation to carry with me.
With a smile from so much kindness on my face and many days of rest in my legs, I now walk further north into the gentrified wilderness…
Someone more like Stu behind my eyes and no private property signs in my heart.
