Preparing for the trail you start to realize how much stuff you use on a daily basis. In the last few weeks you scramble between different outfitters buying way more stuff than you'll ever need. Your attempt is to create the most civilized, overprepared experience for yourself that you can. Your little mind is freaking out as it tries to try to cram your pre-existing life into a little green bag. This is not the right way, but it's the first step. The first shock for me came when I actually had to lift this monster of a pack which probably weighed around sixty pounds before food or water... not optimal for climbing up and down mountains, but it was what I had, and it was time to go. So I slung the beast on my shoulders, said goodbye to family and friends, and set out to the airport. I flew into Bangor, Maine and got a cab to the closest hotel. I smoked out with some sketchy kids and took apart my pack to resecure everything; It seemed excessive as a package, but I couldn't figure out any way around it.. I thought that I needed extra notebooks, changes of clothes, heavy metal carabiners, a hammock and a tarp, full packages of medical supplies, extra, extra, extra. I had no clue, but I'm tenacious. I threw the beast back on and got a ride to Baxter Park where my preconceptions were further picked apart. I had to wait a day to hike the mountain, then come back down on the same side, to stay at the park again, and THEN I would actually be allowed to start. Alot of regulations for the middle of the woods, but I didn't care. I would take any obstacle as it came. It seemed nice enough, I had a place to hang my hammock, a place to start a fire and a stream to drink out of. The rangers were even helping me out wherever they could, I fell into this laxadaisical little daydream.
Until: I actually had to start camping. The hammock did it's best to keep me out, while the bugs faught me back in. Black flies make mosquitos look like little bitches, sometimes you don't notice them until they fly away and theres just a little spot of blood on you where they bit through.. there was alot more than one of them.. My initial idea for food was pasta and red sauce; and rice and beans; plus a jar of peanut butter. I had no stove and all the wood was wet.. Eventually, and I mean eventually, past the charred fingers and the burnt eyes I had a servicable pasta dish, but no fork.. So my first night in the woods, here I am, sitting at a picinic table, covered in bug bites, eating pasta with my fingers and drinking half muddy water.. I was suprisingly happy at the fact I wasn't starving, but there was definitely room for improvement. It was at this point I decided that I knew nothing and I was prepared to accept a completely new model for life.
The next morning I climbed Katahdin, usually the blissful last climb for northbounders (nobos) , but as a sobo It was just the beginning for me. It begins as an unassuming dirt path with a slight elevation and continues to escalate to greater and greater slants, until the trees begin thining out and boulders take their place. Hand over head climbing is an essential skill here. Up and up and up until the peak is within sight. I charged the last twenty feet and pulled myself over the top with a sense of accomplishment. "Hell yeah I just climbed that bitch!" But no, I was greeted by other hikers preparing for the second half of the climb.. which happened to be a pile of rocks resembling a spine at about a sixty degree angle straight up to the flat tableland and then a slight elevation up to the peak which was now within sight in the distance..fml. However hard, however deceptive, and however unprepared I was, there was no lying about this mountain. It was beautiful, it towered above Everything, and it was infinitely greater than I. This little I standing on the mountaintop, amidst the angels, amidst the heavens and completely untouchable by worldy concern. I became Zarathustra, the one who has descended from the mountain. And my legs had done things they had never imagined.
I didn't have enough cash for a regular tent sight, so the ranger set me up in The Birches, a camp usually reserved for nobos finishing up their hike. The veterans I met helped me out with some tips, began painting the picture for what this trail was really like and even gave me a fork and a weather cover for my pack. I decided to head into town and stay at the AT lodge for a night to drop at least half my weight. Field test complete, now it was time to learn the most important lesson that seperates camping from backpacking: The differance between what you think you need and what you really need.
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