Passing Through – Days Ten through Fourteen

I saw Adam leave the garden
With an apple in his hand
I said, “Now you’re out
What are you gonna do?
Plant some crops and pray for rain
Maybe raise a little Cain
I’m an orphan and I’m only passing through.

Dick Blakeslee, “Passing Through”

Day 10: Monday, March 04, 2024 — Plum Orchard Shelter to Standing Indian Shelter (mi. 84.2)

Blessed Carolina Chickadees joined Eastern Phoebes and nuthatches and wrens in waking me. The Plum Orchard shelter stands three stories tall, perhaps the most memorable shelter in Georgia. I slept on the second story with only one other hiker, while a third called Scorpion Queen tented nearby. I spent time in Psalm 5 and more in John 1 again.

But I, through the abundance of Your steadfast love, will enter Your house.
Psalm 5:7a

The day was easy and simple. I crossed into North Carolina at about 11:00. Passed the beautiful gnarled oak tree on the border and some nice campsites. Every part of the day was sweet and gentle. I met a hiker called Two at the Bly Gap campsite and one named Blitz passed while I took lunch; I don’t believe I ever saw either of them again. At the Standing Indian Shelter, where I stopped for the night, I met three other Christian hikers: Mama Bear & Papa Bear, a married couple, and Rooted, who I would see again shortly and much further downtrail as well.

Rooted, like me, felt God had pulled her onto the trail. We exchanged our testimonies briefly, and I enjoyed her company. She was following closely with the Bears who were helping her with hiking advice and generally with the difficulty of being alone long in the wilderness. I caught Snowbear there too, who I had met before at Tray Mountain Shelter. Everyone laughed when he was quick to say “no relation” after introducing himself along with Mama Bear and Papa Bear. Later too, a girl named Casper arrived and shared a lovely brownie batter/m&m/peanut/almond/protein-powder mix with me—fantastic stuff. I remembered Casper for that dessert, and though I did not see her anymore on the Appalachian Trail, I ran into Casper far later in the year when she had finished her thru-hike and I had interrupted mine to hike the Vermont Long Trail.

One more hiker called Lightweight came, and he was interested in chatting about my college life and more. All the people there were fun company and made a great end to a good and relaxing day.

Day 11: Tuesday, March 05, 2024 — Plum Orchard Shelter to Long Branch Shelter (mi. 102.4)

There was a log over a creek where I sat and ate breakfast. My Nalgene fit perfectly and upright into a hole on top. A Winter Wren sang her sesquipedalian tune in the thickets nearby, pure and magnificent. Water-strider bugs scrambled around the trickling brook. I always think they’re just like me, floating easy on tsunamis of grace.

One of my rules when keeping my journal on the trail was that, though I kept record of the places I went, I wouldn’t write about the miles put behind me. That was never the goal. The only consideration I would have of them is hiking short miles in the early days, since this was my first ever backpacking trip, to reduce the risk of hurting myself by excess strain too quickly.

So when before noon on this Tuesday I had hiked a good day’s worth (though my day’s worth would change later) and the weather looked nasty for the afternoon, I stopped where I was and made it another good day.

“When the way was smooth, the Buddha walked it. When it was rough, he rested frequently.”
– Daniel Berrigan, The Dark Night of Resistance

I memorized Psalm 5, which would be nearly the last of the Psalms I memorized on the trail. I wept as I repeated it. There was a sort of fire under me then, and those five psalms carried me through far rougher paths than I had come before (you will see rougher days than these), but something prevented me from going much further—whether pride or indifference, I don’t know. I pray that in the travels and days to come, I can go further and learn more. I came then to spend a lot of time reading the Sermon on the Mount, though I don’t know why. I read it over and over again, looking at the same truths and trying to believe them or understand them a little more. This strange and monastic summer practice changed my life. Despite being known as a preacher and prophet, Jesus spent relatively little of His time standing before crowds and speaking (perhaps that’s part of where our pastors have gone so wrong), so when this one sermon He made was so long and notable, He must have gotten out most of what He wanted everyone to hear. So I heard it over and over again, and it changed over time.

I noticed more water-strider bugs on the creeks in those mornings; I see myself, skimmering alone above the little waves, floating on grace.

I passed by a hiker called Passing Through who told me he had tweaked his hip while night-hiking by stepping on an armadillo. We didn’t talk much that day, but he would make a lasting impact on me in the next couple days.

At the Long Branch Shelter, I ran into three who would make up a large part of my A.T. experience: Shepherd, his son Climber, and their friend Huge, who had been in the packed-out shelter before the freezing night a few days ago. There, I also met Turtle and another whose name I forgot, but I wouldn’t see either of them much more after that.

This day was a long one for me, and an incredible one. Crossing mile 100 and taking photos from the Albert Mountain Fire Tower confirmed in my mind I could finish the whole thing—just had to do that twenty-one more times.

Day 12: Wednesday, March 06, 2024 — Carter Gap Shelter to Franklin, NC (mi. 115.5)

I woke up in a mood, wanting better food and more miles behind me. It was still raining—I was tired of the rain. I considered taking another zero to write, but that idea frustrated me as much as anything else. I wanted to do laundry and take a shower, then get back on trail before dark, and began considering going from there into Franklin, then popping back out to the Siler Bald Shelter, which would make a solid day of hiking and a resupply.

In my journal, I wrote that I felt closer to God already, only twelve days in, but noted the stubbornness of our depravity—that I could be irritated after all God had done for me in so short a time (Lord have mercy). After I shut my journal and began packing it into my bag, I couldn’t fit things into the brain of my pack well enough to zip it shut, no matter how hard I tried. My Bible was there in that section of my bag, so I figured God wanted me to sit a moment longer. I took the Bible out, read Psalm 6, wept awhile, and wrote a little more. Passing Through came by and encouraged me to keep on. Everything packed away in the bag just fine, and we carried on.

I got the rest I wanted after talking to Passing Through a little longer. He was hurting, having been out on the trail a little longer than I had, and doing most of his hiking at night—he said something about enjoying that darkness and privacy more than all the people one usually saw in the day. It was during one of those night hikes he had stepped over a rock and onto an armadillo that then ran out from under him, tossing his foot and hurting his hip; perhaps the only ever armadillo-related injury on the Appalachian Trail.

Passing Through had decided he was going into Franklin that night to get a burger and stay in a hotel, and he offered to let me stay in the room with him at no cost—said he enjoyed my company. I, of course, having woken up wishing for a shower, laundry, and good food, couldn’t turn down the offer, and I had enjoyed Passing Through’s company as much as he seemed to enjoy mine.

The city shuttle picked us up from Rock Gap at 3:45 for $5 a person. The driver was a sweet old black man named Virgil who said he came to Franklin in the 70s chasing a girl and had stayed there chasing her ever since. Passing Through and I resupplied at the local Walmart, I bought a new Ozark Trail stove and ditched my “alternative fuel” stove, then we spent frivolous money at Cookout for double burgers and cajun wraps, got our showers and did a load of laundry, talked God and the Church and all these churches and our walks around the block. He took the bed and I took the window sill, and we fell asleep watching Seinfeld.

Day 13: Thursday, March 07, 2024 — Franklin, NC, to Wayah Shelter (mi. 120.6)

In the morning at the continental breakfast, I had two cups of coffee, three cups of orange juice, a syrup-soaked waffle, a microwaved breakfast burrito, three mini blueberry muffins, and a blueberry bagel with cream cheese, and four containers of yogurt. Virgil picked us up at 9:00 and took us back to Rock Gap, where I found Johnny Cash (not the Johnny Cash… read my previous blog posts) waiting there again for Forest. He and Passing Through talked tobacco and women who chew. Johnny told a raunchy story of a girl in his firefighter days, a coworker, who gave a man CPR while accidentally bouncing on his lap with a dip can in her back pocket.

Passing Through and I hiked together, very slowly, for most of the morning. Our paces made us objectively bad hiking partners, but I knew whenever I left him I would probably never see him again. After we hit trail magic at Winding Stair Gap, I found it a good enough place as any to move on. We exchanged phone numbers and I trucked on, hoping his tortoise would catch my hare.

Passing Through would hike for a long while after that before the pain in his lower back from the armadillo became unbearable; he quit the trail and visited a doctor, discovering he had hiked over a hundred miles with a fractured vertebra.

The day felt long, but the miles didn’t prove it. I made an auto-insurance cancellation call and wrote a bad poem I would later spend a lot of time editing, but not quite figure out—still, a line from it, “I am a weak and faithless man,” would become a refrain of mine. I called my grandfather to talk about a visit and thought about my brother while I sang “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” and whistled and hummed my way up trail. A great tuna and peanut butter tortilla marked my plummeting into hiker-trash status, but I hiked hard and didn’t stop much that day.

On Siler Bald, I met two thru-hikers from New York who didn’t have trail names at the time, but would later go through several before settling on “Wonka” and “Tweedle.” They were a lively pair—full of inside jokes and colloquialisms I wouldn’t get for a million reasons in the thousands of miles between our childhoods—who didn’t hang out that often except as each others’ “adventure buddies,” having run a marathon in the arctic together the year before. I loved Passing Through’s dark humor and sudden solemnity, but I needed this humorous and energetic oasis that day. One took a keen interest in my story, so while we hiked hard up Wayah Bald, he prodded questions and I protracted testimonies of God and birdwatching and relayed the Gospel in more ways than I can remember having shared it now. I hope and pray fruitful seeds were planted.

Wayah Bald proved unexpectedly spectacular. Clingman’s Dome was visible among the Smokies in one direction, Rabun Bald in Georgia rising in the other just left of the Albert Mountain Fire Tower, visible as only a tiny dot over the massive range we had crossed in a couple of days. I took a video pointing and shouting and sent it home to a family group chat, but I suppose the video must have been blurry or unintelligible… they couldn’t have matched my enthusiasm anyway.

The pair had just bought a new, bigger ultralight stove for themselves, so they offered to leave me their smaller one, not knowing how perfectly it would fit my brand-new Ozark Trail stove I had bought the day before (Jehovah Jireh). They also left me with a ton of food, because they planned soon to pick up a packaged resupply they had sent to the NOC.

Wonka and Tweedle pitched a tent, but I stayed in the shelter with a man named John. We stayed up till 9:30 (a late night for the trail in March, 9:00 being “hiker midnight”) talking movies and how media and languages shape our culture, then food waste and the tragedy of our exploitation of other countries by our importation practices, and of course, God and the Church and all these churches. I shared my testimony as relates to the pretense of most protestant worship—the reason John left the church long ago—then how incredibly kind God has been to me in all this time. Another instance of only hoping and praying fruitful seeds were planted.

Day 14: Friday, March 08, 2024 — Wayah Shelter to Cold Springs Shelter (mi. 125.4)

In the morning, John left food with me on top of that which the other pair already had for all the same reasons. He shook my hand and thanked me for the company, and I thanked him for the conversation and the food, and I encouraged him with the truth that he could finish the walk with easy persistence.

I stayed there until the afternoon writing, drinking cocoa-coffee from John, then tea from Wonka and Tweedle, praising God for His provision over me. Even better days were to come, too. While I took my late morning folks came by who I hadn’t met before: Slow & Steady (a man and his dog), Patsy (Pat hikes the A.T. on Youtube—I’m featured in his days 21 and several after that). I also ran into Scorpion Queen, who I had met several days before, and Cutie, a man near my age who ended his day there when I was just beginning mine from the same place, but would later join a “tramily” (trail-family) with me and become a dear friend of mine. Scorpion Queen and Cutie had both zeroed in Franklin the day Passing Through and I left.

I hopped from there to the Cold Spring Shelter (at 4.8 miles, this would be the second shortest-distance day I hiked on the trail), named for the wonderful cold spring that gushes only a few steps from the shelter. I was satisfied to take the short day writing fourteen pages in my journal and devouring a lot of the food gifted to me, then hiking out with new gear and loads of extra snacks, showered and laundered.

Patsy wasn’t a great conversationalist, but we got along great and chatted in the shelter as the sun set and cold rain poured. At the end of dusk, just before it was too dark to see, a young solo girl without any rain gear came barreling into the shelter with her dog. The rain utterly soaked through her jacket and everything in her pack. Pat and I stared at her in shock, offering hot hands and jackets and bivvy bags, but she declined any help, lay down with her drenched UL quilt, and pulled her little dog against her, trying to go to sleep.

The girl had attempted a southbound thru-hike the year before but had to quit after injuring herself too badly to carry on. That year after the incomplete trek, she took weekends off work and began to bandage the sections of trail she had not finished before.

Patsy pulled the edge of her quilt over her shivering dog. I worried she would be dead when we woke in the morning, but the women who thru-hike don’t match those anywhere else. She told us she slept just fine, then carried on earlier in the morning than either of us.

I had wondered, too, how I would be getting to church the following Sunday. I had become distracted from the scripture memorizing and caught up more on the journaling and poeticizing. But God provided for me every time, from Amicalola to Katahdin.