Between imagination and logistics
In which dreams of the open trail give way to equipment reviews, spreadsheets replace Japanese poetry, and my dog will not get off the couch. At last, a plan emerges.
It is widely known that one does not simply walk into Mordor; it is less commonly recognized that one cannot simply walk much of anywhere these days.
Lately I find myself reading books about people who simply pack up and go someplace, to make a new home or only to see what is there. These stories are often inspiring, occasionally forbidding, and in practical terms almost completely useless. Here are two examples from the top of my pile.
When the poet Matsuo Bashō set off on “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” (as he titled his chronicle of the journey) his preparation consisted of “mending my torn trousers, tying a new strap to my hat, and applying moxa to my legs to strenghten them,” moxa being the dried leaf of artemisia moxa, which (as I learn from the editor’s footnote) was crumbled, applied to the skin and ignited. Lacking moxa (though I have considered asking after it at REI) I have been strengthening my legs by the less convenient method of actually using them.
Then there was the distressing paucity of Bashō’s gear:
When I reached the village of Sōka in the evening [of the first day], my bony shoulders were sore because of the load I carried, which consisted of a paper coat to keep me warm at night, a light cotton gown to wear after the bath, scanty protection from the rain, writing equipment, and gifts from certain friends of mine. I wanted to travel light, of course, but there were always certain things I could not throw away for either practical or sentimental reasons.
Silly sod probably didn’t even have a collapsible walking stick.
That was the 1600s, in Japan. A century later in the mountains of North Carolina, in John Ehle’s novel The Landbreakers, young Mooney and Ima Wright set off to find the land they have just impulsively bought. They have a gun, a bag of seed, a small collection of tools bought with the last of their hard money, a “she-dog,” a horse, several pigs, a milk cow, and some chickens in a cage which they strapped to the horse. They are looking for a river ford and a hickory tree marked with three deep gashes, somewhere in the wilderness.
As they climbed the trail out of Old Fort, they entered a misty spot, then walked into a cloud. They were in that cloud all day. The place was damp, and the trail was eerie; the whole place looked like a ghost world to them. That night they lay in each other's arms near the fire and comforted one another, assured one another they had done right in this, and on the second day they went on up, walking as fast as they could manage. At last they came to the top of the climb, to the gap, and they came into sunlight there. Below them was the sea of clouds that covered the lowlands. They were above the clouds, above the world of Old Fort and Morganton, and doubtless of Virginia and Pennsylvania, too....
They walked along a valley near the small nameless river which foamed downward toward the west—not toward the east at all, as they would expect. That night they made a fire, Mooney using his rifle flint and a speck of powder, and cooked a piece of fish.... Then the night came in on them and they felt close, felt like belonging here, as if they had won out at last over the various misfortunes and handicaps of life down there, way off in the lowlands.
Everything about the first pages of this novel makes me want to run off into the highlands. Then reality seeps in, for the reader as well as (spoiler!) the Mooneys. When at last they find their valley they are “limping, body-tired, bone-aching, belly-taut,” which is the only part of their experience I am likely to replicate. Well, and the clouds, maybe. But my she-dog isn't going to leave her upholstered chair for anything short of dinner, and it had better be a good one if I don’t want the stink eye, with something to liven up that crummy kibble; and speaking of dinner, you need a license to fish, bub, and we can’t let you build a fire here because we have to assume people are too stupid to handle fire, which they mostly are.
The only tale I’ve read lately of someone who carefully planned and outfitted his journey was Felice Benuzzi’s memoir No Picnic on Mount Kenya, but as all of Benuzzi’s food and mountain-climbing equipment had to be begged, borrowed, stolen, or MacGyvered from a British POW camp, it isn’t considerably more helpful to the modern through-hiker.
In something like the spirit of these adventures, I started this project of hiking the Mountains-to-Sea Trail without a clear strategy, figuring one would emerge as I went along. Thus far I have spent as much time puzzling over logistics as I have actually walking.
It is widely known that one does not simply walk into Mordor; it is less commonly recognized that one cannot simply walk much of anywhere these days. As a rule you have to stick to trails, which may be nonexistent, or to roads, which were not designed for walking. You cannot hole up and sleep when and where you get tired, but only in designated camping areas, which usually cost money and must be reserved in advance. You definitely cannot bring your cow along for the milk. Moreover you are likely to have certain expectations of comfort that cannot be met by paper coats and hand-sewn shoes, and also certain expectations of personal health that cannot be met by drinking unfiltered surface water.
Imagination gives way to logistics. To planning. Hours poring over maps and trail guides. Buying stuff I didn’t think I needed or wanted.
Close to home I can cover the trail with day hikes, on the fly, as time and weather permit. West of Asheville and along the Outer Banks will eventually be week-long backpacking trips, with wilderness treks through swampland and national forests. In between there are decisions to make.
Half of the trail—9 or 10 segments out of 18—lies within a two and a half hour drive of my house. I am willing to drive two and a half hours each way for a day hike, but not often, and it needs to be worth the trip—there needs to be some attraction on the trail. My standards are low. A general store, a gallery, a cup of coffee. Even mountains need not be high to interest me.
Through-hiking is half the walking and less than half the driving, but it means asking someone else to drive me, not to mention I have to plan to be away from home for days at a time. There are places where the trailheads are spaced too far apart for easy day hiking (given that I have to walk both ways) and others where the options for camping and lodging are scarce. There are places I would like to have time to linger, and long stretches of roadway that I would rather only walk once. I want to plan all this efficiently. I have spreadsheets.
Then there is the fact that I have not backpacked since Boy Scouts (and not much even then) and have camped exactly twice as an adult. There are things I need to try out before I take on a week-long backpacking trip, like consecutive 15-mile hikes and solo camping and water filtration. I also need to buy a tent and a sleeping bag. And figure out how I am going to make coffee.
Backpacking through the Great Smoky Mountains is, in reality, less like a premodern journey than like a moon mission. Bear with me here. As a kid in the late seventies I was briefly obsessed with the American space program, such as it was in the days between Skylab and Columbia. I could name all the moons of Jupiter (there were only twelve then) or tell you about all the early missions that led up to the moon landing. Most of that knowledge was cleared out years ago to make way for more important things, like lyrics to REM songs, but here is the basic outline. The Mercury program was about getting a guy into space, around the earth, and home again without killing him. The basic stuff. Apollo was the goal: landing on the moon.
In between were the Gemini missions, which tested all the tricky stuff we would need to do to get to the moon and back. Could we keep astronauts alive up there for a week? Two weeks? What are they going to eat? What do they need to wear? What are they going to do with their, you know, waste? Could we send them outside to repair something while the craft was in orbit? Could we dock two craft? That sort of thing. All this was new in 1965.
I figure I am in my Gemini phase. Multi-day hikes, camping, filling up and paring down the backpack, figuring out how far I can walk in a day. What to eat, what to wear, what to do with my, you know, waste.
With all this in mind, I decided to cover Segment 9 this fall, which runs from northeast of Greensboro to the western edge of Durham. The trailheads are from forty to seventy-five minutes away by car, and there are plenty of trailheads for parking but not always convenient lodging or camping. So I broke it into five out-and-back day hikes of 12, 10, 14, 15, and 15 miles (round trip) and a two-day, one-way hike covering 26½ miles. The first two day hikes are already in the books: more on them next time.
Meanwhile, as I have time, I’ll keep working west along Falls Lake (Segment 10), and along the Neuse River Trail through Raleigh (Segment 11). Late fall and winter, weather permitting, I may do some day hikes farther west, and as soon as the weather warms up enough I’ll do a test-run camping at Falls Lake or along the Eno River, where if things go to hell I can get home quickly. Come spring I’ll make a couple of backpacking trips along the roads east of Raleigh, camping along the way, and covering, I hope, Segments 12 and 13. That leaves late spring and early summer to fit in a trip to the mountains.
If all goes well, I’ll be through more than a third of the 1200 mile trail by the summer solstice. If all does not go well, I’ll be eaten by bears. Or, more likely, smashed to pieces by an errant pickup truck in the wild exurbs north of Greensboro—whence more next week.
Notes and further reading
Literary works quoted are Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa (Penguin Books, 1966), pp. 97, 158, 160; and John Ehle, The Land Breakers (New York Review Books, 2014; orig. pub. 1964), pp. 15–16.
You can learn about the real Gemini missions from the NASA website. (You may have to dig about for information about waste management.) I assume you can find REM lyrics for yourself.
Regarding the moons of Jupiter: When I learned this stuff at age 8 or 9, in order to acquire knowledge we had to read things called “books,” which may have been as much as several years old by the time we got our grubby hands on them. The lag between discovery and dissemination is one of those things I forget about pre-Internet days—the limits not just on what you could learn easily, but on how soon you could learn it. In fact the thirteenth moon had been discovered in 1974, but the news of it had not yet reached the Quarryville Public Library by the end of the decade. When the two Voyager missions flew by Jupiter in 1979 they found three more, but as the Lancaster New Era did not run in-depth features on planetary science I don’t know where I would have heard of them. Today, one can simply check Wikipedia and learn that there are now ninety-five moons with confirmed orbits around Jupiter, which is far too many.
The photo of the “MST command center” is of course NASA Mission Control in Houston, during the early hours of the Gemini IV mission in June 1965. The astronaut in the header photo is Ed White, performing the first spacewalk outside Gemini IV.