Trail Journal: 04.07.05

Twelve mile day to Woods Hole shelter in the rain and fog.  Rain started last night.  Morning was wet and foggy.  Woods were very ethereal.  Trail very muddy.  Mostly mist starting out until Woody Gap when rain started falling in earnest, whipped by a strong wind that sounded at times like a locomotive.  Between the rain and sweat I was pretty wet but I just kept moving.  Stopped only to water up and load food into my pockets to eat on the move.  Covered the 12 miles in six hours of steady walking.  No views at all today.  Only a little gunfire.  Just glad to be in the shelter now, dry and warm.  Raining like hell now with thunder and lightning.

Trail Journal: 04.06.05

Pulled into Gooch Gap shelter around 12:30--so much easier walking than 2002.  Just took my time and got here without much effort.  Starting to cloud up so I guess the rain is coming in.  Good to be under a roof to sleep and cook if it does rain.  Trail today was lots of up and down, just as I remembered, but this time I didn't have to contend with Maggie's increasingly painful knees.

Woods are open and sunny.  Some green is pushing up from the forest floor.  The hemlocks and pines add a bit more greenery but he overall color is gray and brown.  Heard some gunfire and saw a chopper today but not like yesterday when I saw several Blackhawks and heard automatic weapons fire well into the night.  Shelter is filling up--everybody wants to get in ahead of the rain.

Later:  Everything's done now, dinner and sketching.   A little light left and time to kill.  Lots of people on the trail in this prime hiking season.  I've met Wilderness Bob, Gypsy Eagle, Fig, Just Visiting, KG, Josh, Loose Goose, Elf and Cait so far.  Lots of company for this solo hike.

Trail Journal: 04.05.05

Easy, easy day.  Walked five miles and am in by 12:30 at Hawk Mountain shelter.  My memory of this section from 2002 are not nearly as gentle.  Maybe because we walked a longer day that year and Maggie's knees began hurting.  Today started off cool with some clouds by mid-morning the sky cleared and it's been sunny and breezy ever since.  Lots of company at Hawk Mountain today: the two women I met last night at Stover Creek are here along with two retired Green Berets and a couple of young section hikers from Atlanta.  Another eight or ten hikers stopped in before continuing on.  I'm sure others will pull in before nightfall.  I'm camped much closer to the shelter tonight than last night so I expect the evening to be highly social.  That's been pretty much  I've been doing for the past three hours.

Being back on the AT is exciting.  So many memories come back to me here:  meeting Kutsa, Sylvain and Medicine Man playing chess on a homemade board, sleeping with Maggie on the upper deck.  The trail looks vaguely familiar and some places I recognize--Long Creek Falls in particular and some of the road crossings.  Walking today was easy, covered five miles in just over three hours.  I was in no hurry.  Saw a few Blackhawk helicopters flying around and heard artillery from the Army base at Dahlonega.

The early morning woods were suffused with light reflecting off rhododendron leaves.  Buds are forming and some greenery is starting to push through the forest duff.  It's spring.  I'm on the trail and all things seem possible.

Trail Journal: 04 April 2005

Camped at Stover Creek shelter on the first night of my AT "make up" hike.  Walked a blistering 2.5 miles today--only 1.5 miles with a pack.  My brother Neil drove me up from Atlanta to Forest Road 42, about a mile north of Springer Mountain summit.  Getting there took a bit of route finding--Neil's DeLorme Atlas software plotted out a rather strange route--but after asking for directions at a store, we found the road.  Walked south with Neil and dog, Greta, to the the summit, touched the AT plaque, came back to the vehicle, and started walking solo with pack.  It was easy walking--much more so than 2002.  Feels strange to be here on my own--no Red and Gary, no Maggie like last time, just me and other hopeful hikers.

Blog News

This space has been pretty quiet the past few months.  All my writing effort since January has been going to drafting the final version of my Vietnam memoir.  I've been downloading as much as I can remember of my year in Vietnam and pulling together work dating back to the 70's to see what story I have to tell and what would make it worth reading to anyone.  Maybe it will be nothing more than getting it on record.  Right now it's nothing that merits publishing that hasn't already been published at Unsolicited Opinion, my original blog.  Two of those posts, One Day and One Night, sum Vietnam up for me.    

With all that I've not had much to say, either here or at Unsolicited Opinion.  I'm also not entirely sure what to do with this blog.  It began as a marketing tool for a my book about the Appalachian Trail so it's trail- and outdoors-oriented.  But I also think it's about books and writing, topics that may take me away from trail topics at times.  So far, I haven't come up with a good balance or clear pattern that makes for frequent and sustained writing in this space. 

One of my favorite sources for copy are my trail journals.  Coming up in April is the 10th anniversary of my Missing Miles AT hike in 2005.  I plan to blog my journal from that hike off and on between April and June.  That may kick start something here.  Not long after I finish blogging the Missing Miles is the 30th anniversary of the Zion Death March.  I will tell that tale then.  We'll see where things go from there.

Hope you enjoy the journey.

Best Ever Advice for a Writer

“I can’t write with those people on my shoulder, I just have to do my work.”

     --Cheryl Strayed

Best Books in 2014

For the purposes of this blog "best" is defined as my favorites among the books I read in 2014:

Fiction

The Man Who Loved Dogs, Leonardo Padura (2009, translation 2014)

Cuban writer Leonardo Padura recreates the assassination of Leon Trotsky with a deft tale of intrigue set in the context of Joseph Stalin’s quest for absolute power in the Soviet Union and the pre-war climate of the 1930’s.  Leon Trotsky’s exile is a well-told story which Padura leavens with some introspection and regrets on Trotsky’s part.  Alongside Trotsky’s odyssey, the reader is introduced to Ramon Mercader, a Spanish Republican plucked from the defeat of the his cause by the KGB and trained as an assassin.  All of this is narrated by a Cuban writer who encounters a mysterious man and his two Russian Wolfhounds at a beach.  As the mysterious man confides in him, the narrator begins to suspect that he is talking to the assassin himself.  Each subplot brings its own set of contradictions, erratic behavior and, ultimately, understanding.   The early chapters read much like a history of the era but as each subplot evolves the reader is drawn into the details of each man’s thoughts and actions.  Although Trotsky’s assassination is a foregone conclusion, Padura invests the story with mystery and suspense.

The All-Girl Filling Station’s Last Reunion, Fanny Flagg (2013)

A tale well-told about discovery and history.  Sarah Jane Poole, “Sookie” to everyone in Point Clear, Alabama, approaches her 60^th birthday to learn that she is an adopted child.  Her birth certificate showing the woman Sookie has known all her life as mother is a forgery.  Her real birth certificate lists a Polish mother and unknown father.  The discovery changes her life.  How Sookie’s life changes gradually reveals itself along with the story of Fritzi Jurdabralinski, the name listed on the birth certificate as mother.  Fanny Flagg tells the story in a lively, often funny narrative that captures the feel of small-town South and tells the story of the remarkable women who flew military aircraft during WWII.

 
 Non-Fiction

The Heart of Everything That Is:  the Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend, Bob Drury & Tom Clavin (2013)

Excellent history of the Indian leader Red Cloud, whose multi-year campaign against white expansion forced the US government to sue for peace.  Authors Drury and Clavin are clearly sympathetic to the Indian point-of-view; in their telling, Red Cloud’s resistance makes perfect sense.  What makes the story compelling is the detail about Indian culture and strategy.  Red Cloud’s achievement was unifying fractious and independent Sioux bands in a strategic campaign against the US Army whose institutional racism did not credit Indians with strategic ability.  This history debunks the image created in film and TV of the cavalry coming to the rescue.  Not only were the troops not cavalry—they were mounted infantry—but their horses were often worn-out, ammunition in short supply, and officers prone to fall for the bait in one of Red Cloud’s ambushes.  Add the Sioux’s mobility and knowledge of the terrain and you have the bluecoats at a disadvantage.  The authors don’t spare the Army leadership, a collection of officers whose ambition and prejudices often worked to Red Cloud’s advantage.

The Sleepwalkers:  How Europe Went to War in 1914, Christopher Clark (2012)

A detailed, intricate history of the interests, intrigues, rivalries that led the great powers of Europe to create a series of alliances with, as Christopher Clark writes, “a trigger set in the most volatile region of Europe.”  The story  is long and involved—562 pages of text, 100 pages of notes—but Clark carefully and systematically lays out all of the threads to present a comprehensive history of how that trigger exploded with an assassination in Sarajevo in 1914.